^p Samuel Caplor CoIcriUffe. 



LETTERS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLE- 
RIDGE. Edited by Ernest Hartley 
Coleridge. With i6 Portraits and other 
Illustrations. 2 vols. 8vo, ^6.00. 

ANIWIA POET/E. Edited by Ernest Hart- 
ley Coleridge. Svo. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., 
Boston and New York. 



ANIMA POET/E 

FROM THE UNPUBLISHED NOTE-BOOKS 
OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 



EDITED BY 



ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

i^hc fiitictisitie pre??, Cambridge 



1895 



K^ 




/%f7W 



4,^ 



^>v* 



Copyright, 1895, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

All rights reserved. 



I Z- 3J^-C^J 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 



When shall I find time and ease to reduce my pocket- 
books and memorandums to an Index or Memorice Memo- 
randorum ? If — aye ! and alas ! — if I could see the last 
sheet of my Assertio Fidei Christiance, et eterni temporizantis, 
having previously beheld my elements of Discourse, Logic, 
Dialectic, and Noetic, or Canon, Criterion, and Organon, 
with the philosophic Glossary — in one printed volume, 
and the Exercises in Reasoning as [another — if — what 
then ? Why, then I would publish all that remained 
unused. Travels and all, under the title of Excursions 
Abroad and at Home, what I have seen and what I have 
thought, with a little of what I have felt, in the words in 
which I told and talked them to my pocket-books, the 
confidants who have not betrayed me, the friends whose 
silence was not detraction, and the inmates before whom 
I was not ashamed to complain, to yearn, to weep, or even 
to pray ! To which are added marginal notes from many 
old books and one or two new ones, sifted through the 
Mogul Sieve of Duty towards my Neighbor — by "fiiTTjjo'e. 

SI June, 1S23. 



PREFACE 

Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Tay- preface 
lor Coleridge, which the poet's nephew and 
son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, published in 
1835, was a popular book from the first, and has 
won the approval of two generations of readers. 
Unlike the Biographia Literaria, or the original 
and revised versions of The Friend, which never 
had their day at all, or the Aids to Reflection, 
which passed through many editions, but now 
seems to have delivered its message, the Table 
Talk is still well-known and widely read, and 
that not only by students of literature. The 
task which the editor set himself was a difficult 
one, but it lay within the powers of an attentive 
listener, possessed of a good memory and those 
rarer gifts of a refined and scholarly taste, a 
sound and luminous common sense. He does 
not attempt to reproduce Coleridge's conversa- 
tion or monologue or impassioned harangue, but 
he preserves and notes down the detached frag- 
ments of knowledge and wisdom which fell from 
time to time from the master's lips. Here are 
" the balmy sunny islets of the blest and the 
intelligible," an un vexed and harbor ous archi- 
pelago. Very sparingly, if at all, have those 
pithy " sentences " and weighty paragraphs been 
trimmed or pruned by the pious solicitude of the 
memorialist, but it must be borne in mind that 
the unities are more or less consciously observed, 

V 



PREFACE 

PREFACE alike in the matter of the discourse and the 
artistic presentation to the reader. There is, in 
short, not merely a " mechanic " but an " organic 
regularity " in the composition of the work as a 
whole. A " myriad-minded " sage, who has seen 
men and cities, who has read widely and shaped 
his thoughts in a peculiar mould, is pouring out 
his stores of knowledge, the garnered fruit of a 
life of study and meditation, for the benefit of an 
apt learner, a discreet and appreciative disciple. 
A day comes when the marvellous lips are con- 
strained to an endless silence, and it becomes 
the duty and privilege of the beloved and hon- 
ored pupil to " snatch from f orgetf ulness " and 
to hand down to posterity the great tradition of 
his master's eloquence. A labor of love so use- 
ful and so fascinating was accomplished by the 
gifted editor of the Table Talh, and it was ac- 
complished once for all. The compilation of a 
new Table Talh^ if it were possible, would be a 
mistake and an impertinence. 

The present collection of hitherto unpublished 
aphorisms, reflections, confessions, and solilo- 
quies, which for want of a better name I have 
entitled Anima Poetm, does not in any way 
challenge comparison with the Table Talk. It 
is, indeed, essentially different, not only in the 
sources from which it has been compiled but in 
constitution and in aim. 

" Since I left you," writes Coleridge in a letter 
to Wordsworth of May 12, 1812, " my pocket- 
books have been my sole confidants." Doubt- 
less, in earlier and happier days, he had been 
eager not merely to record, but to communicate 
to the few who would listen or might understand 
vi 



PREFACE 

the ceaseless and curious workings of his ever- preface 
shaping imagination, but from youth to age note- 
books and pocket-books were his silent confidants, 
his " never- failing friends " by night and day. 

More than fifty of these remarkable documents 
are extant. The earliest of the series, which 
dates from 1795, and which is known as the 
" Gutch Memorandum Book," was purchased in 
1868 by the trustees of the British Museum, 
and is now exhibited in the King's Library. It 
consists, for the most part, of fragments of prose 
and verse thrown off at the moment, and stored 
up for future use in poem or lecture or sermon. 
A few of these fragments were printed in the 
Literary Remains (4 vols., 1836-39), and others 
are to be found (pp. 103, 5, 6, 9 et j^issini) in 
Herr Brandl's Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the 
English Romantic School. The poetical frag- 
ments are printed in extenso in Coleridge's Poet- 
ical Works (Macmillan, 1893), pp. 453-58. A 
few specimens of the prose fragments have been 
included in the first chapter of this work. One 
of the latest notebooks, an unfinished folio, con- 
tains the Autobiograjihic Note of 1832, portions 
of which were printed in Gilhnan's Life of Cole- 
ridge^ pp. 9-33, and a mass of unpublished mat- 
ter, consisting mainly of religious exercises and 
biblical criticism. 

Of the intervening collection of pocket-books, 
notebooks, copy-books, of all shapes, sizes, and 
bindings, a detailed description would be tedious 
and out of place. Their contents may be roughly 
divided into diaries of 'tours in Germany, the 
Lake District, Scotland, Sicily, and Italy ; notes 
for projected and accomplished works, rough 
vii 



PREFACE 

drafts of poems, schemes of metre and metrical 
experiments ; notes for lectures on Shakspere and 
other dramatists ; quotations from books of travel, 
from Greek, Latin, German, and Italian classics, 
with and without critical comments ; innumerable 
fragments of metaphysical and theological spec- 
ulation ; and commingled with this unassorted 
medley of facts and thoughts and fancies an 
occasional and intermitted record of personal 
feeling, of love and friendship, of disappointment 
and regret, of penitence and resolve, of faith and 
hope in the Unseen. 

Hitherto, but little use has been made of this 
life-long accumulation of literary material. A 
few specimens, " Curiosities of Literature " they 
might have been called, were contributed by 
Coleridge himself to Southey's Omniana of 1812, 
and a further selection of some fifty fragments, 
gleaned from notebooks 21^ and 22, and from 
a third unnumbered MS. book now in my pos- 
session, were printed by H. N. Coleridge in the 
first volume of the Literary Remains under the 
heading Omniana, 1809-1816. The Omniana 
of 1812 were, in many instances, re-written by 
Coleridge before they were included in Southey's 
volumes, and in the later issue, here and there, 
the editor has given shape and articulation to an 
unfinished or half-formed sentence. The earlier 
and later Omniana, together with the fragments 
which were published by Allsop in his Letters, 
Conversation, and Recollections of S. T. Cole- 
ridge, in 1836, were included by the late Thomas 
Ashe in his reprint of the Table Talk, Bell and 
Co., 1884. 

Some fourteen or fifteen notes of singular 
viii 



PREFACE 

interest and beauty, which belong to the years preface 
1804, 1812, 1826, 1829, etc., were printed by 
James Gillman in his unfinished " Life of Cole- 
ridge," and it is evident that he contemplated a 
more extended use of the notebooks in the con- 
struction of his second volume, or, possibly, the 
publication of a supplementary volume of notes 
or Omniana. Transcripts which were made for 
this purpose are extant, and have been placed 
at my disposal by the kindness of Mrs. Henry 
Watson, who inherited them from her grand- 
mother, Mrs. Gillman. 

I may add that a few quotations from diaries 
of tours in the Lake Country and on the Conti- 
nent are to be found in the footnotes appended 
to the two volumes of Letters of Samuel Taylor 
Coleridge which were issued in the spring of the 
present year. 

To publish the notebooks in extenso would be 
impracticable, if even after the lapse of sixty years 
since the death of the writer it were permissible. 
They are private memoranda-books and rightly 
and properly have been regarded as a sacred 
trust by their several custodians. But it is none 
the less certain that in disburthening himself of 
the ideas and imaginations which pressed upon 
his consciousness, in committing them to writ- 
ing and carefully preserving them through all 
his wanderings, Coleridge had no mind that they 
should perish utterly. The invisible pageantry of 
thought and passion which forever floated into 
his spiritual ken, the perpetual hope, the half 
belief that the veil of the senses would be rent in 
twain, and that he and not another would be the 
first to lay bare the mysteries of being, and to 
ix 



PREFACE 

solve the problem of the ages — of these was the 
breath of his soul. It was his fate to wrestle 
from night to morn with the Angel of the Vision, 
and of that unequal combat he has left, by way 
of warning or encouragement, a broken but an 
inspired and inspiring record. " Hints and first 
thoughts " he bade us regard the contents of his 
memorandum-books — " cogitahilia rather than 
cogitata a me, not fixed opinions," and yet acts 
of obedience to the apostolic command of " Try 
all things : hold fast that which is good " — say, 
rather, acts of obedience to the compulsion of his 
own genius to " take a pen and write in a book 
all the words of the vision." 

The aim of the present work, however imper- 
fectly accomplished, has been to present in a 
compendious shape a collection of unpublished 
aphorisms and sentences, and at the same time to 
enable the reader to form some estimate of those 
strange self-communings to which Coleridge de- 
voted so much of his intellectual energies, and 
by means of which he hoped to pass through the 
mists and shadows of words and thoughts to a 
steadier contemplation, to the apprehension If 
not the comprehension, of the mysteries of Truth 
and Being. 

The various excerpts which I have selected 
for publication are arranged, as far as possible, 
in chronological order. They begin with the 
beginning of Coleridge's literary career, and are 
carried down to the summer of 1828, when he 
accompanied Wordsworth and his daughter 
Dora on a six months' tour on the Continent. 
The series of notebooks which belong to the 
remaining years of his life (1828-1834) were 



PREFACE 

devoted for the most part to a commentary preface 
on the Old and New Testament, to theological 
controversy, and to metaphysical disquisition. 
Whatever interest they may have possessed, or 
still possess, appeals to the student, not to the 
o-eneral reader. With his inveterate love of hu- 
morous or facetious titles, Coleridge was pleased 
to designate these serious and abstruse disserta- 
tions as " The Flycatchers." 

My especial thanks are due to Amy, Lady 
Coleridge, who, in accordance with the known 
wishes of the late Lord Coleridge, has afforded 
me every facility for collating my own tran- 
scripts of the notebooks, and those which were 
made by my father and other members of my 
family, with the original MSS. now in her pos- 
session. 

I have also to thank Miss Edith Coleridge 
for valuable assistance in the preparation of the 
present work for the press. 

The death of my friend, Mr. James Dykes 
Campbell, has deprived me of aid which he alone 
could give. 

It was due to his suggestion and encourage- 
ment that I began to compile these pages, and 
only a few days before his death he promised 
me (it was all he could undertake) to "run 
through the proofs with my pencil in my hand." 
He has passed away multis Jlebilis, but he lived 
to accomplish his own work both as critic and 
biographer, and to leave to all who follow in his 
footsteps a type and example of honest work- 
manship and of literary excellence. 

Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 
xi 



ANIMA POETiE 



CHAPTER I. 

1797-1801. 

Youth ! for years so many and sweet, 
'T is known, that Thou and I were one. 

S. T. C. 

" "We should ludffe of absent things by the ab- past and 

^1 . . 1 • 1 J. J. 2. PRESENT 

sent. Objects which are present are apt to pro- 
duce perceptions too strong to be impartially 
compared with those recalled only by the mem- 
ory." — Sir J. Stewart. 

True ! and O how often the very opposite is 
true likewise, namely, that the objects of memory 
are, often, so dear and vivid, that present things 
are injured by being compared with them, vivid 
from dearness! 

[The comment is of later date than the quota- 
tion.] 

Love, a myrtle wand, is transformed by the love 
Aaron touch of jealousy into a serpent so vast 
as to swallow up every other stinging woe, and 
makes us mourn the exchange. 

Love that soothes misfortune and buoys up to 
virtue — the pillow of sorrows, the wings of vir- 
tue. 

Disappointed love not uncommonly causes 
1 



EXPERI 

ENCE 



ANIMA POET^ 

misogyny, even as extreme thirst is supposed to 
be the cause of hydrophobia. 

Love transforms the soul into a conformity 
with the object loved. 

DUTY AND From the narrow path of virtue Pleasure 
leads us to more flowery fields, and there Pain 
meets and chides our wandering. Of how many 
pleasures, of what lasting happiness, is Pain the 
parent and Woe the womb I 

Keal pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. 
We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky 
enough to feel misery. 

Misfortunes prepare the heart for the enjoy- 
ment of happiness in a better state. The life 
of a religious benevolent man is an April day. 
His pains and sorrows [what are they but] the 
fertilizing rain ? The sunshine blends with every 
shower, and look ! how full and lovely it lies on 
yonder hill ! 

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour 
of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of 
a child deadly sick. 

Human happiness, like the aloe, is a flower of 
slow growth. 

What we must do let us love to do. It is a no- 
ble chymistry that turns necessity into pleasure. 

INFANCY 1, The first smile — what kind of reason it 
FANis displays. The first smile after sickness. 

2 



t 

ANIMA POETiE 

2. Asleep with the polyanthus held fast in its 
hand, its bells dropping over the rosy face. 

3. Stretching after the stars. 

4. Seen asleep by the light of glow-worms. 

5. Sports of infants; their excessive activity, the 
means being the end. Nature, how lovely a school- 
mistress ! . . . Children at houses of industry. 

6. Infant beholding its new-born sister. 

7. Kissing itscK in the looking-glass. 

8. The Lapland infant seeing the sun. 

9. An infant's prayer on its mother's lap. 
Mother directing a baby's hand. (Hartley's 
" love to Papa," scrawls pothooks and reads 
what he meant by them.) 

10. The infants of kings and nobles. (" Prin- 
cess unkissed and foully husbanded I "} 

11. The souls of infants, a vision {vide Swe- 
denborg). 

12. Some tales of an infant. 

13. SropyT/. The absurdity of the Darwinian 
system (instanced by) birds and alligators. 

14. The wisdom and graciousness of God in 
the infancy of the human species, — its beauty, 
long continuance, etc. (Children in the wind, — 
hair floating, tossing, a miniature of the agitated 
trees below which they played. The elder whirl- 
ing for joy the one in petticoats, a fat baby eddy- 
ing half willingly, half by the force of the gust, 
driven backward, struggling forward, — both 
drunk with the pleasure, both shouting their 
hymn of joy.) [Letters of S. T. (7., 1895, i. 408.] 

15. Poor William seeking his mother, in love 
with her picture, and having that union of beauty 
and filial affection that the Virgin Mary may be 
supposed to give. 

3 



ANIMA POET^ 

POETRY Poetry, like schoolboys, by too frequent and 

severe correction, may be cowed into dulness ! 

Peculiar, not far-fetched ; natural, but not ob- 
vious ; delicate, not affected ; dignified, not swell- 
ing ; fiery, but not mad ; rich in imagery, but 
not loaded with it, — in short, a union of har- 
mony and good sense, of perspicuity and concise- 
ness. Thought is the body of such an ode, en- 
thusiasm the soul, and imagery the drapery. 

Dr. Darwin's poetry is nothing but a succes- 
sion of landscapes or paintings. It arrests the 
attention too often, and so prevents the rapidity 
necessary to pathos. 

The elder languages were fitter for poetry be- 
cause they expressed only prominent ideas with 
clearness, the others but darkly. . . . Poetry 
gives most pleasure when only generally and not 
perfectly understood. It was so by me with 
Gray's « Bard " and Collins' Odes. The " Bard " 
once intoxicated me, and now I read it without 
pleasure. From this cause it is that what I call 
metaphysical poetry gives me so much delight. 

[Compare Lecture vi., 1811-12, Bell & Co., 
p. 70 ; and Tahle Talk, Oct. 23, 1833, BeU & 
Co., p. 264.] 

coMPARi- Poetry which excites us to artificial feelings 
makes us callous to real ones. 



SONS AND 
CON- 
TRASTS 



The whale is followed by waves. I would 
glide down the rivulet of quiet life, a trout. 
4 



ANIMA POET^ 

Australls [Southey] may be compared to an 
ostrich. He cannot fly, but he has such other 
qualities that he needs it not. 

Mackintosh intertrudes, not introduces, his 
beauties. 



Snails of intellect who see only by their feel- 



ers. 



Pygmy minds, measuring others by their own 
standard, cry. What a monster^ when they view 
a man ! 

Our constitution is to some like cheese, — the 
rotten parts they like the best. 

Her eyes sparkled as if they had been cut out 
of a diamond quarry in some Golconda of Fairy- 
land, and cast such meaning glances as would 
have vitrified the flint in a murderer's blunder- 
buss. 

[A task] as difficult as to separate two dew- 
drops blended together on a bosom of a new- 
blown rose. 

I discovered unprovoked malice in his hard 
heart, like a huge toad in the centre of a marble 
rock. 

Men anxious for this world are like owls that 
wake all night to catch mice. 

At Genoa the word Liberty is engraved on 
5 



VISIBLE 
AND IN- 
VISIBLE 



ANIMA POETiE 

the chains o£ the galley slaves and the doors of 
prisons. 

Gratitude, worse than witchcraft, conjures up 
the pale, meagre ghosts of dead forgotten kind- 
nesses to hamit and trouble [his memory]. 

The sot, rolling on his sofa, stretching and 
yawning, exclaimed, " Utinam hoc esset laho- 
rare.^^ 

Truth still more than Justice [is] blind, and 
needs Wisdom for her guide. 

OF THINGS [A proof of] the severity of the winter, — the 
kingfisher [by] its slow, short flight permitting 
you to observe all its colors, almost as if it had 
been a flower. 

Little daisy, — very late spring, March. Quid 
si vivat ? Do all things in faith. Never 'pluck 
a flower again! Mem. 

May 20, The nightingales in a cluster or little wood of 

blossomed trees, and a bat wheeling incessantly 
round and round ! The noise of the frogs was 
not unpleasant, like the humming of spinning 
wheels in a large manufactory, — now and then 
a distinct sound, sometimes like a duck, and 
sometimes like the shrill notes of sea-fowl. 

[This note was written one day later than 
S. T. C.'s last letter from Germany, May 19, 
1799.] 

O Heavens I when I think how perishable 
6 



ANIMA POET^ 

tilings, how imperishable thoughts seem to be ! 
For what is forgetfulness ? Kenew the state of 
affection or bodily feeling [so as to be the] same 
or similar, sometimes dimly similar, and, in- 
stantly, the trains of forgotten thoughts rise 
from their living catacombs ! 

Few moments in life are so interesting as those [Soek- 
of our affectionate reception from a stranger who tober, 1799 
is the dear friend of your dear friend! How 
often you have been the subject of conversation, 
and how affectionately ! 

[The note commemorates his first introduction 
to Mary and Sarah Hutchinson.] 

The immovableness of all things through which Friday 
so many men were moving, — a harsh contrast Nov"27,' 
compared with the universal motion, the har- ^^^ 
monious system of motions in the country, and 
everywhere in Nature. In the dim light Lon- 
don appeared to be a huge place of sepulchres 
through which hosts of spirits were gliding. 

Eidicule the rage for quotations by quoting 
from " My Lady's Handkerchief." Analyze the 
causes that the ludicrous weakens memory, and 
laughter, mechanically, makes it difficult to re- 
member a good story. 

Sara sent twice for the measure of George's ^ 
neck. He wondered that Sara should be such a 
fool, as she might have measured William's or 
Coleridge's, — as " all poets' throttles were of one 



size. 



^ Presumably George Dyer. 

7 



ANIMA POETiE 

Hazlitt, the painter, told me that a picture 
never looked so well as when the pallet was by 
the side of it. Association, with the glow of 
production. 

Mr. J. Cairns, in the Gentleman' s Diary for 
1800, supposes that the Nazarites, who, under 
the law of Moses, had their heads [shaved], must 
have used some sort of wigs ! 

Slanting pillars of misty light moved along 
under the sun hid by clouds. 

Leaves of trees upturned by the stirring wind 
in twilight, — an image of paleness, wan affright. 

A child scolding a flower in the words in 
which he had been himself scolded and whipped, 
is poetry, — passion past with pleasure. 

July 20, Poor fellow at a distance, — idle ? in this hay- 

time when wages are so high ? [We] come near 
[and] then [see that he is] pale, can scarce speak 
or throw out his fishing-rod. 

[This incident is fully described by Words- 
worth in the last of the four poems on " Naming 
of Places." — Poetical Works of W. Words- 
worth, 1889, p. 144.] 

September The beards of thistle and dandelions flying 
1, [1800] ^Ijq^^ ^\^q lonely mountains like life, — and I saw 
them through the trees skimming the lake like 
swallows. 

[" And, in our vacant mood. 
Not seldom did we stop to watch some tuft 
8 



ANIMA POETiE 

Of dandelion seed or thistle's beard, 

That skimmed the surface of the dead calm lake, 

Suddenly halting now — a lifeless stand ! 

And starting off again with freak as sudden ; 

In all its sportive wanderings, all the while. 

Making report of an invisible breeze 

That was its wings, its chariot, and its horse. 

Its playmate, rather say, its moving soul." 

lUd., p. 143.] 

Luther, — a hero, fettered, indeed, with preju- 
dices, — but with those very fetters he would 
knock out the brains of a modern fort esjwit. 

Comment. Frightening by his prejudices, as 
a spirit does by clanking his chains. 

Not only words, as far as relates to speaking, 
but the knowledge of words as distinct compo- 
nent parts, which we learn by learning to read, 

— what an immense effect it must have on our 
reasoning faculties ! Logical in opposition to real. 

Children, in making new words, always do it 1797-I80i 
analogously. Explain this. 

Hot-headed men confuse, your cool-headed 
gentry jumble. The man of warm feelings only 
produces order and true connection. In what a 
jmnble M. and H. write, every third paragraph 
beginning with " Let us now return," or " We 
come now to the consideration of such a thing " 

— that is, what / said I loould come to in the 
contents prefixed to the chapter. 

Dec. 19 

The thin scattered rain-clouds were scudding isoo 



ANIMA POET^ 

along tlie sky ; above them, with a visible inter- 
space, the crescent moon hung, and partook not 
of the motion ; her own hazy light filled up the 
concave, as if it had been painted and the colors 
had run. 

" He to whom all things are one, who draweth 
all things to one, and seeth all things in one, 
may enjoy true peace of mind and rest of spirit." 

— Jekome Taylor's Via Pads. 

To each reproach that thunders from without 
may remorse groan an echo. 

A prison without ransom, anguish without 
patience, a sick-bed in the house of contempt. 

To think of a thing is different from to per- 
ceive It, as "to walk" is from to "feel the 
ground under you ; " perhaps In the same way too, 

— namely, a succession of perceptions accom- 
panied by a sense of nisus and purpose. 

Space, Is It merely another word for the per- 
ception of a capability of additional magnitude, 
or does this very perception presuppose the Idea 
of space ? The latter is Kant's opinion. 

A babe who had never known greater cruelty 
than that of being snatched away by its mother 
for half a moment from the breast In order to be 
kissed. 

To attempt to subordinate the Idea of time to 
that of likeness. 

10 



ANIMA POETiE 

Every man asks liow ? This power to instruct 
is the true substratum of philosophy. 

" Godwin's philosophy is contained in these 
words : Rationem defectus esse defectum ratio- 

7lis.'' HOBBES. 

Hartley, just able to speak a few words, making 
a fireplace of stones, with stones for fire, — four 
stones for the fireplace, two for the fire, — seems 
to illustrate a theory of language, the use of ar- 
bitrary symbols in imagination. Hartley walked 
remarkably soon and, therefore, learnt to talk re- 
markably late. 

Anti-optimism ! Praise be our Maker, and to 
the honor of human nature is it, that we may 
truly call this an inhuman opinion. Man strives 
after good. 

Materialists unwilling to admit the mysterious 
element of our nature make it all mysterious ^ 
nothing mysterious in nerves, eyes, etc., but that 
nerves think, etc. ! Stir up the sediment into the 
transparent water, and so make all opaque. 

As we recede from anthropomorphism we must 1797-1801 
go either to the Trinity or Pantheism. The Fa- 
thers who were Unitarians were antliroj)omor- 
phites. 

Empirics are boastful and egotists because egotism 
they introduce real or apparent novelty, which isoi^^'^^' 
excites great opposition [while] personal opposi- 
tion creates re-action (which is of course a con- 
11 



ANIMA POET^ 

sclousness of power) associated witli the person 
re-acting. Paracelsus was a boaster, it is true ; 
so were the French Jacobins, and Wolff, though 
not a boaster, was persecuted into a habit of ego- 
tism in his philosoj)hical writings ; so Dr. John 
Brown, and Milton in his prose works ; and 
those, in similar circumstances, who, from pru- 
dence, abstain from egotism in their writings are 
still egotists among their friends. It would be 
unnatural effort not to be so, and egotism in such 
cases is by no means offensive to a kind and dis- 
cerning man. 

Some flatter themselves that they abhor ego- 
tism, and do not suffer it to appear 'primci facie, 
either in their writings or conversation, how- 
ever much and however personally they or their 
opinions have been opposed. What now ? Ob- 
serve, watch those men ; their habits of feeling 
and thinking are made up of conteinpt, which is 
the concentrated vinegar of egotism, — it is laiii- 
tia mixta cum odio, a notion of the weakness of 
another conjoined with a notion of our own com- 
parative strength, though that weakness is still 
strong enough to be troublesome to us, though 
not formidable. 

" And the deep power of Joy 
We see into the Life of Things." 
By deep feeling we make our ideas dim, and this 
is what we mean by our life, ourselves. I think 
of the wall. It is before me a distinct image. 
Here I necessarily think of the idea and the 
thinking / as two distinct and opposite things. 
Now let me think of myself, of the thinking 
being. The idea becomes dim, whatever it be — 
12 



ANIMA POET.E 

so dim that I know not what it is ; but the feel- 
ing is deep and steady, and this I call / — iden- 
tifying the percipient and the perceived. 

" O Thou ! whose fancies from afar are brought." 

Hartley, looking out of my study window, March 17, 
fixed his eyes steadily and for some time on the Tuesday 
opposite prospect and said, " Will yon mountains 
always be ? " I showed him the whole magnifi- 
cent prospect in a looking-glass, and held it up, 
so that the whole was like a canopy or ceiling 
over his head, aud he struggled to express him- 
self concerning the difiference between the thing 
and the image almost with convulsive effort. I 
never before saw such an abstract of thinhlng as 
a pure act and energy, — of thinking as distin- 
guished from thought. 

Monday, April, 1801, and Tuesday, read two giordano 
works of Giordano Bruno, with one title-page : ^^^^^ 
Jordani Brimi Nolani de Jlonadc, Numero et 
Figura liber consequens. Qulnque de llinimo^ 
Macjno et 3Iensura. Item. De Innumerahili- 
hus Imynenso, et Infigurahili seu de Universo et 
3Iundis lihri octo. Francofiirti^ Apiid Joan. 
Wechelutn et Petruin Fischerum consortes^ 
1591. 

Then follows the dedication, then the index of 
contents of the whole volume, at the end of which 
index is a Latin ode, conceived with great dignity 
and grandeur of thought. Then the work De 
Monade^ Numero et Figura secretioris nem,pe 
Phjsicce^ Matliematicm^ et Metaiilmjsicm ele- 
menta commences, which, as well as the eight 
13 



ANIMA POETiE 

books De Innumercibili^ etc., is a poem in Latin 
hexameters, divided (each book) into chapters, 
and to each chapter is affixed a prose commen- 
tary. If the five books de llinimo, etc., to 
which this book is consequent, are of the same 
1797-1801 character, I lost nothing in not having it. As to 
the work De 3Ionade^ it was far too numerical, 
lineal, and Pythagorean for my compensation. 
_^t read very much like Thomas Taylor and Pro- 
clus, etc. I by no means think it certain that 
there is no meaning in these works. Nor do I 
presume even to suppose that the meaning is of 
no value (till I understand a man's ignorance I 
presume myself ignorant of his understanding), 
but it is for others, at present, not for me. Sir 
P. Sidney and Fulk Greville shut the doors at 
their philosophical conferences with Bruno. If 
his conversation resembled this book, I should 
have thought he would have talked with a trum- 
pet. 

The poems and commentaries in the De Im- 
menso et Innumerdbili are of a different charac- 
ter. The commentary is a very sublime enuncia- 
tion of the dignity of the human soul, according 
to the principles of Plato. 

[Here follows the passage, " Anima Sapiens 
. . . uhique totus^^ quoted in The Friend 
(^Coleridge s Works^ ii. 109), together with a 
brief resume of Bruno's other works. See, too, 
Biograjjhia Literaria, chapter ix. (^Coleridge's 
Works, iii. 249).] 

OBSERVA- The spring with the little tiny cone of loose 
REFLEc- sand ever rising and sinking at the bottom, but 
Tioxs -^g g^rface without a wrinkle. 

14 . 



ANIMA POETxE 

Northern lights remarkably fine — chiefly a Monday, 
purple-blue — in shooting pyramids, moved from ilfi^ ^' 
over Bassenthwaite behind Skiddaw. Derwent's » 

birthday, one year old. 

Observed the great half moon setting behind SeptemLer 
the mountain ridge, and watched the shapes its ' 
various segments presented as it slowly sunk — 
first the foot of a boot, all but the heel — then a 
little pyramid A — then a star of the first mag- 
nitude, indeed, it was not distinguishable from 
the evening star at its largest — then rapidly a 
smaller, a small, a very small star — and, as it 
diminished in size, so it grew paler in tint. And 
now where is it ? Unseen — but a little fleecy 
cloud hangs above the mountain ridge, and is 
rich in amber light. 

I do not wish you to act from those truths. 
No ! still and always act from your feelings ; 
but only meditate often on these truths, that^, 
sometime or other they may become your feelings. 

The state should be to the religions under its 
protection as a well-drawn picture, equally eye- 
ing all in the room. 

Quaere, whether or no too great definiteness of 
terms in any language may not consume too 
much of the vital and idea-creating force in dis- 
tinct, clear, fidl-made images, and so prevent 
originality. For original might be distinguished 
from positive thought. 

The thing that causes instability in a particu- 
15 



ANIMA POETiE 

lar state, of itself causes stability. For instance, 
wet soap slips off the ledge — detain it till it dries 
a little, and it sticks. 

Is there anything in the idea that citizens are 
fonder of good eating and rustics of strong drink 
— the one from the rarity of all such things, the 
other from the uniformity of his life ? 

On the Greta, over the bridge by Mr. Ed- 
mundson's father-in-law, the ashes — their leaves 
of that light yellow which autumn gives them — 
cast a reflection on the river like a painter's sun- 
shine. 

My birthday. The snow fell on Skiddaw and 
Grysdale Pike for the first time. 

[A life-long mistake. He was born October 
21, 1772.] 

All the mountains black and tremendously 
obscure, except Swinside. At this time I saw, 
one after the other, nearly in the same place, two 
perfect moon-rainbows, the one foot in the field 
below my garden, the other in the field nearest 
but two to the church. It was gray-moonlight- 
mist-color. Friday morning, Mary Hutchinson 
arrives. 

The art of a great man, and of evidently su- 
perior faculties, to be often ohliged to people, 
often his inferiors — in this way the enthusiasm 
of affection may be excited. Pity where we can 
help and our help is accepted with gratitude, 
conjoined with admiration, breeds an enthusiastic 
16 



ANIMA POET^ 

affection. The same pity conjoined with admira- 
tion, where neither our help is accepted nor effi- 
cient, breeds dyspathy and fear. 

Nota bene to make a detailed comparison, in 
the manner of Jeremy Taylor, between the 
searching for the first cause of a thing and the 
seeking the fountains of the Nile — so many 
streams, each with its particular foimtaiu — and, 
at last, it all comes to a name. 

The soul a mummy embalmed by Hope in the 
catacombs. 

To write a series of love poems truly Sapphic, 
save that they shall have a large interfusion of 
moral sentiment and calm imagery — love in all 
the moods of mind, philosophic, fantastic — in 
moods of high enthusiasm, of simple feeling, of 
mysticism, of religion — comprise in it all the 
practice and all the philosophy of love ! 

'O [xvpun'ov<; — hyperbole from Naucratius' pan- 
egyric of Theodorus Chersites. Shakspere, item, 

6 TTOXAOO-TOS Kai TToXuCtS^? TT) TTOLKLXoO-TpOcfxa (TOffiLa. 

6 /xeya/\o<^pcovoTaTOS t^s aXy]6ua<; K-qpv^. — LORD 

Bacon. 

[Compare Biographia Literaria, cap. xv., 
" our myriad-minded Shakspere," and footnote. 
'Avy]p iJivpi6vov<;, a phrase which I have borrowed 
from a Greek monk, who applies it to a Patriarch 
of Constantinople. I might have said that I have 
reclaimed rather than borrowed it ; for it seems 
to belong to Shakspere, de jure singularly et ex 
privilegio naturm. Coleridge's Works, iii. 375.] 
17 



1802-1803 



CHAPTER II. 



1S02-1S03. 



In a half sleep, he dreams ot better worlds, 
And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark. 
That singest like an angel in the clouds ! 



S. T. C. 



TFfouGiiTs No one can leap over his own shadow, but 
FANCIES poets leap over death. 

The old world begins a new year. That is 
ours, but this is from God. 



LIMBO 



We may think of time as threefold. Slowly 
comes the Future, swift the Present passes by, 
but the Past is unmovable. No impatience will 
quicken the loiterer ; no terror, no delight, rein in 
the flyer ; and no regret set in motion the station- 
ary. Wouldst be happy, take the delayer for 
thy counsellor ; do not choose the flyer for thy 
friend, nor the ever-remainer for thine enemy. 

Vastum, incultum, solitudo mera, et incrinitis- 
sima nuditas. 

\^Crinitus, covered with hair, is to be found 
in Cicero, miditas in Quintilian, but incrinitis- 
sima is, probably, Coleridgian Latinity.J 

[An old man gloating over his past vices may 
be compared to the] devil at the very end of 
hell, warming himself at the reflection of the fire 
in the ice. 

18 



ANIMA POET^ 

Dimness of vision, mist, etc., magnify the pow- 
ers of siglit, numbness adds to tliose of touch. A 
numb limb seems twice its real size. 

Take away from sounds the sense of outness, 
and what a horrible disease would every minute 
become ! A drive over a pavement would be ex- 
quisite torture. What, then, is sympathy if the 
feelings be not disclosed ? An inward reverber- 
ation of the stifled cry of distress. 

Metaphysics make all one's thoughts equally 
corrosive on the body, by inducing a habit of 
making momently and common thought the sub- 
ject of uncommon interest and intellectual en- 
ergy. 

A kind-hearted man who is obliged to give a 
refusal, or the like, which will inflict great pain 
finds a relief in doing it roughly and fiercely. 
Explain this and use it in Christahd. 

The unspeakable comfort to a good man's 
mind, nay, even to a criminal, to be understood^ 
— to have some one that understands one, — and 
who does not feel that, on earth, no one does ? 
The hope of this, always more or less disa]> 
pointed, gives the passion to friendship. 

Hartley, at Mr. Clarkson's, sent for a candle. October, 
The seems made him miserable. " What do 
you mean, my love ? " " The seems, the seems. 
What seems to be and Is not, men and faces, 
and I do not [know] what, ugly, and sometimes 
pretty, and these turn ugly, and they seem when 
19 



ANIMA POET^ 

my eyes are open and worse when they are shut, 
— and the candle cures the seems.'''' 

Great injury has resulted from the supposed 
incompatibility of one talent with another, judg- 
ment with imagination and taste, good sense with 
strong feeling, etc. If it be false, as assuredly 
it is, the opinion has deprived us of a test which 
every man might apply. [Hence] Locke's opin- 
ions of Blackmore, Hume's of Milton and Shak- 
spere. 

I began to look through Swift's works. First 
volume, containing Tale of a Tub, wanting. 
Second volume, — the sermon on the Trinity, 
rank Socinianism, 2^ums putus Socinianlsm^ 
while the author rails against the Socinians for 
monsters. 

The first sight of green fields with the num- 
berless nodding gold cups, and the winding river 
with alders on its banks, affected me, coming out 
of a city confinement, with the sweetness and 
power of a sudden strain of music. 

Mem. To end my preface with " in short, 
speaking to the poets of the age, ' Pinmus ves- 
trum non sum, neque imus.^ I am none of the 
best, I am none of the meanest of you." — Burton. 

" Et pour moi, le bonheur n'a commence que 
lorsque je I'ai en perdu. Je mettrais volontiers 
sur la porte du Paradis le vers que le Dante a 
mis sur celle de I'Enfer, 

' Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate.' " 

20 



K 



ANIMA POET.E 

"Were I Achilles, I would have had my leg 
cut off, and have got rid of my vulnerable heel. 

In natural objects we feel ourselves, or think 
of ourselves, only by lihenesses ; among men, 
too often by diferences. Hence the soothing, 
love-kindling effect of rural nature — the bad 
passions of human societies. And wliy is differ- 
ence linked with hatred ? 

Regular post — its influence on the general tran- 
literature of the country ; turns two thirds of the "fkom my 
nation into writers. J^per^" 

POCKET- 
BOOKS 

Socinianism, moonlight ; methodism, a stove. 
O for some sun to unite heat and light ! 

I intend to examine minutely the nature, Nov. 25, 

. . 1802 

cause, birth, and growth of the verbal imagina- 
tion, in the possession of which Barrow excels 
almost every other writer of prose. 

1 Remember the pear-trees in the lovely vale of Sunday, 

Teme. Every season Nature converts me from 19^^^"^ 
some unloving heresy, and will make a Catholic 
of me at last. 

A fine and apposite quotation, or a good story, 
so far from promoting, are wont to dajnp the 
easy commerce of sensible chit-chat. 

We imagine ourselves discoverers, and that we 
have struck a light, when, in reality, at most we 
have but snuffed a candle. 
21 



ANIMA POET^ 

A thief in the candle, consmning in a blaze 
the tallow belonging to the wick which has sunk 
out of sight, is an apt simile for a plagiarist from 
a dead author. 

An author with a new play which has been 
hissed off the stage is not imlike a boy who has 
launched on a pond a ship of his own making, 
and tries to prove to his schooKellows that it 
ought to have sailed. 

Eepose after agitation is like the pool under a 
waterfall, which the waterfall has made. 

Something inherently mean in action ! Even 
the creation of the universe disturbs my idea of 
the Almighty's greatness — would do so but that 
I perceive that thought with Him creates. 

The great federal republic of the universe. 

T. Wedgwood's objection to my " Things and 
Thoughts," because " thought always implies an 
act or nisus of mind," is not well founded. A 
thought and thoughts are quite different words 
from Thought, as a fancy from Fancy, a work 
from Work, a life from Life, a force and forces 
from Force, a feeling, a writing [from Feelings, 
Writings]. 

May 10, To fall aslccp. Is not a real event in the 

body well represented by this phrase ? Is it in 
excess when on first dropping asleep we fall 
down precipices, or sinh down, all things sinking 
beneath us, or drop down ? Is there not a dis- 
22 



ANIMA POETiE 

ease from deficiency of this critical sensation 
when people iniagiue that they ha\'e been awake 
all night, and actually lie dreaming, expectino- 
and wishing for the critical sensation ? 

[Compare the phrase, "precipices of distem- 
pered sleej)," in tlie sonnet, " No more my vi- 
sionary soul shall dwell," attributed by Southey 
to Fa veil. — L\fc and Correspondence of li. 
Southey, i. 224.] 

[He] drew out tlie secrets from men's hearts, a thkacii 
as the Egyptian enchanters by particular strains T^]^'^k 
of music draw out serpents from their lurking- 
places. 

Tlie rocks and stones j)ut on a vital resem- rdimTUY 
bianco, and life itself seemed, tliereby, to forego town 
its restlessness, to anticipate in its own nature 
an infinite repose, and to become, as it were, 
compatible with immovability. 

Bright reflections, in the canal, of tlie blue 
and green vitriol bottles in the druggists' shops 
in London. 

A curious, and more than curious, fact, that 
when the country does not benefit, it doprav(>s. 
Hence the violent, viiuHctlve jiassions and the 
outrageous and dark and wild cruelties of very 
many country folk. [On the other hand] the 
continual sight of human fa<!(!S and human 
houses, as in China, emasculates [and de- 
grades]. .. , 

° -• Monday 

ni^'Iit, 

" Ho who cannot wait for his reward has, in isulT ' 
23 



ANIMA POETiE 



reality, not earned it." These words I uttered 
in a dream, in wliich a lecture I was giving — a 
very profound one, as I tliouglit — was not lis- 
tened to, but I was quizzed. 



Tuesday 
night, 
July 19, 
1803 



October, 
1803 



Intensely hot day ; left off a waistcoat and for 
yarn wore silk stockings. Before nine o'clock, 
had unpleasant chillness ; heard a noise which I 
thought Derwent's in sleep, listened, and found 
it was a calf bellowing. Instantly came on my 
mind that night I slept out at Ottery, and the 
calf in the field across the river whose lowing so 
deeply impressed me. Chill + child and calf- 
lowing, probably the Eivers Greta and Otter. 
[Letters of S. T. C, i. 14 note.] 

A smile, as foreign or alien to, as detached 
from the gloom of the countenance, as I have 
seen a small spot of light travel slowly and sadly 
along the mountain's breast, when all beside has 
been dark with the storm. 



A PRINCI- 
PLE OF 
CRITICISM 



WORDS- 
WORTH 
AND THE 
PRELUDE 



Never to lose an opportunity of reasoning 
against the head-dimming, heart-damping prin- 
ciple of judging a work by its defects, not its 
beauties. Every work must have the former, — 
we know it a prio7'i, — but every work has not 
the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them, 
tells you something that you could not with cer- 
tainty, or even with probability, have anticipated. 

I am sincerely glad that he has bidden fare- 
well to all small poems, and is devoting himself 
to his great work, grandly imprisoning, while it 
deifies, his attention and feelings within the 
24 



ANIMA POET^ 

sacred circle and temple-walls of great objects 
and elevated conceptions. In those little poems, 
his own corrections coming o£ necessity so often 
— at the end of every fourteen or twenty lines, 
or whatever the poem might chance to be — wore 
him out ; difference of opinion with his best 
friends irritated him, and he wrote, at times, too 
much with a sectarian spirit, in a sort of bravado. 
But now he is at the helm of a noble bark ; now 
he sails right onward ; it is all open ocean and a 
steady breeze, and he drives before it, unfretted 
by short tacks, reefing and unreefing the sails, 
hauling and disentangling the ropes. His only 
disease is the having been out of his element ; 
his return to it is food to famine ; it is both the 
specific remedy and the condition of health. 

Without drawing, I feel myself but half in- the in- 
vested with language. Music, too, is wanting to cable 
me. But yet, though one should unite poetry, 
draftsman's skill, and music, the greater and, 
perhaps, nobler — certainly all the subtler — 
parts of one's nature must be solitary. Man ex- 
ists herein to himself and to God alone — yea ! 
in how much only to God ! how much lies below 
his own consciousness ! 

The tree or seaweed like appearance of the 
side of the mountain, all white with snow, made 
by little bits of snow loosened. Introduce this 
and the stones leaping rabbit-like down on my 
sopha of sods [vide p. GO]. 

_ The sunny mist, the luminous gloom of Plato. 
25 



TIMK AN 
KliKMKNT 



ANIMA POETiE 

Nothing affects me mucli at the moment it 
happens. It either stupefies me, and 1, i)erliaps, 
look at a merry-make and dance-the-hay of flies, 
or listen entirely to the loiid click of the great 
clock, or I am simi)ly indifferent, not without 
some sense of philosoi)hical self-complacency. 
For a thing at the moment is but a thing of the 
moment ; it must be ^aken up into the mind, 
diffuse itself though the whole multitude of 
shapes and thoughts, not one of which it leaves 
untinged, between not one of which and it some 
new thought is not engendered. Now this is a 
work of time, but the body feels it quicker with 
me. 



THE rOKT 
AND THE 
SriDKU 



On St. Herbert's Island, I saw a large spider 
with most beautiful legs, floating in the air on 
his back by a single thread which he was spin- 
ning out, and still, as he spun, heaving on the 
air, as if the air beneath was a pavement elastic 
to his strokes. From the top of a very high tree 
he had spun his line ; at length reached the 
bottom, tied his thread round a piece of grass, 
and reascended to spin another, — a net to hang, 
as a fisherman's sea-net hangs, in the sun and 
wind to dry. 



THE COM- 
JUINICA- 

ItLE 



One excellent use of communication of sorrow 
to a friend is this, that in relating what ails us, 
we ourselves first know exactly what the real 
grief is, and see it for itself in its own form and 
limits. Unspoken grief is a misty medley of 
which the real affliction only plays the first 
fiddle, blows the horn to a scattered mob of ob- 
Perhaps, at certain moments, a 
26 



scure feelings 



ANIMA POET/E 

single, almost insignificant sorrow may, by asso- 
ciation, bring together all the little relicts of 
pain and discomfort, bodily and mental, that we 
have endured even from infancy. 

One may best judge of men by their pleasures, noscituu 
Who has not known men who have passed the ^ ^°^"^ 
day in honorable toil with honor and ability, and 
at night sought the vilest pleasure in the vilest 
society ? This is the man's self. The other is 
a trick learnt by heart (for we may even learn 
the power of extemporaneous elocution and in- 
stant action as an automatic trick) ; but a man's 
pleasures — children, books, friends, nature, the 
Muse — O, these deceive not. 

Even among good and sensible men, how com- tempera- 
mon it is that one attaches himself scrin)ulouslv to '''''^''' ^ 

,,..,„ 1 J "" MO HALS 

tne rigul pertormanee of some minor virtue, or <Jt^tober 
makes a point of carrying some virtue into all its ^^^"^ 
minutia;, and is just as lax in a similar point, 
professedly lax. What this is depends, seem- 
ingly, on temperament. A makes no conscience 
of a little flattery in cases where he is certain 
that he is not acting from base or interested mo- 
tives — in short, whenever his only motives are 
the anuxscment, the momentary pleasure given, 
etc., a medley of good nature, diseased proneness 
to sympathy, and a habit of hemr/ 'wiser behind 
the curtain than his own actions before it. B 
would die rather than deviate from truth and 
sincerity in this instance, but permits himself to 
utter, nay, publish, the harshest censure of men 
as moralists and as literati, and that, too, on his 
simple ijjse dlxit^ without assigning any reason 
27 



MENT AND 
MO HALS 



ANIMA POET.E 



and often without having any, save that he him- 
seK believes it — believes it because he dislikes 
the man, and dislikes him probably for his looks, 
or, at best, for some one fault without any col- 
lation of the sum total of the man's qualities. 
Yet A and B are both good men, as the world 
They do not act from conscious self-love. 



ffoes. 



and are amenable to principles in their own 
minds. 



Bright 

October 

October 

21, 1803, 

Friday 

morning 



A drizzling rain. Heavy masses of shapeless 
vapor upon the mountains (O the perpetual 
forms of Borrowdale !), yet it is no unbroken tale 
of dull sadness. Slanting pillars travel across 
the lake at long intervals, the vaporous mass 
whitens in large stains of light — on the lake- 
ward ridge of that huge armchair of Lodore fell 
a gleam of softest light, that brought out the 
rich hues of the late autumn. The woody Castle 
Crag between me and Lodore is a rich flower- 
garden of colors — the brightest yellows with 
the deepest crimsons and the infinite shades of 
brown and green, the infinite diversity of which 
blends the whole, so that the brighter colors seem 
to be colors upon a ground, not colored things. 
Little wool-j)acks of white bright vapor rest on 
different summits and declivities. The vale is 
narrowed by the mist and cloud, yet through the 
wall of mist you can see into a bower of sunny 
light, in Borrowdale; the birds are singing in 
the tender rain, as if it were the rain of April, 
and the decaying foliage were flowers and blos- 
soms. The pillar of smoke from the chimney 
rises up in the mist, and is just distinguishable 
from it, and the mountain forms in the gorge 
28 



ANIMA POET.E 

of Borrowdale consubstantiates with the mist 
and cloud, even as the pillar'd smoke — a shade 
deeper and a determinate form. 

A most unpleasant dispute with Wordsworth teleo- 
and Hazlitt. I spoke, I fear, too contemptuously ; jj atuke 
but they spoke so irreverently, so malignantly of ^protest 
the Divine Wisdom that it overset me. Hazlitt, October 
how easily raised to rage and hatred seli-j)ro- 
jected ! but who shall find the force tliat can 
drag him out of the depths into one expression 
of kindness, into the showing of one gleam of the 
light of love on his countenance. Peace be with 
him 1 But thou, dearest Wordsworth — and 
what if Ray, Durham, Paley have carried the 
observation of the ajititude of things too far, too 
habitually into pedantry ? O how many worse 
pedantries ! how few so harmless, with so much 
efficient good ! Dear William, pardon pedantry 
in others, and avoid it in yourself, instead of 
scoffing and reviling at pedantry in good men 
and a good cause, and hecoming a pedant your- 
self in a bad cause — even by that very act be- 
coming one. But, surely, always to look at the 
superficies of objects for the purpose of taking 
delight in their beauty, and sympathy with their 
real or imagined life, is as deleterious to the 
health and manhood of intellect as always to be 
peering and unravelling contrivance may be to 
the simplicity of the affection and the grandeur 
and unity of the imagination. O dearest Wil- 
liam! would Ray or Durham have spoken of 
God as you spoke of Nature ? 

Hazlitt to the feelings of anger and hatred, w. H. 
29 



ANIMA POETiE 

phosphorus — it is but to open the cork and it 
flames — but to love and serviceable friendship, 
let them, like Nebuchadnezzar, heat the furnace 
with a sevenfold heat, this triune, Shadrach, 
Meshach, Abed-nego, will shiver in the midst 
of it. 

THE OKI- I sate for my picture [to Hazlitt] — heard 
EVIL from Southey the " Institution of the Jesuits," 

Ooto^ber^^' during which some interesting idea occurred to 
27, 1803 nie, and has escaped. I made out, however, the 
whole business of the origin of evil satisfactorily 
to my own mind, and forced H. to confess that 
the metaphysical argument reduced itself to this, 
Why did not infinite Power always exclusively 
produce such beings as in each moment of their 
duration were infinite ? why, in short, did not 
the Almighty create an absolutely infinite number 
of Almighties ? The hollowness and impiety of 
the argument will be felt by considering that, 
suppose a universal happiness, a perfection of 
the moral as well as natural world, still the 
whole objection applies just as forcibly as at this 
moment. The malignity of the Deity (I shudder 
even at the assumption of this affrightful and 
Satanic language) is manifested in the creation 
of archangels and cherubs and the whole com- 
pany of pure Intelligences burning in their un- 
quenchable felicity, equally as in the creation 
of Neros and Tiberiuses, of stone and lejirosy. 
Suppose yourself perfectly happy, yet, according 
to this argument, you ouyTit to charge God with 
malignity for having created you — your own 
life and all its comforts are in the indictment 
against the Creator — for surely even a child 
30 



ANIMA POETiE 

would be ashamed to answer, " No ! I should still 
exist, only in that case, instead of being a man, 
I should be an infinite being." As if the word 
/ here had even the remotest semblance of a 
meaning. Infinitely more absurd than if I 
should write the fraction yJ^^ on a slate, then 
rub it out with my sponge, and write in the same 
place the integral number 555,666,879, and then 
observe that the former figure was greatly im- 
proved by the measure, that it was grown a far 
finer figure ! — conceiting a change where there 
had been positive substitution. Thus, then, it 
appears that the sole justification of those who, 
offended by the vice and misery of the created 
world, as far as we know it, impeach the power 
and goodness of the Almighty, making the proper 
cause of such vice and misery to have been a 
defect either of power or goodness — it appears, 
I say, that their sole justification rests on an 
argument which has nothing to do with vice and 
misery, as vice and misery — on an argument 
which would hold equally good in heaven as in 
hell — on an argument which it might be demon- 
strated no human being in a state of happiness 
could ever have conceived — an argument which 
a millennium would annihilate, and which yet 
would hold equally good then as now ! But even 
in point of metaphysics the whole rests at last on 
the conceivable. Now, I appeal to every man's 
internal consciousness, if he will but sincerely 
and in brotherly simplicity silence the bustle of 
argument in his mind and the ungenial feelings 
that mingle with and fill up the mob, and then 
ask his own intellect whether, supposing he could 
conceive the creation of positively infinite and co- 
31 



ANIMA POET^ 

equal beings, and whether, supposing this not 
only possible but real, this has exhausted his 
notion of creatability f whether the intellect, by 
an unborn and original law of its essence, does 
not demand of infinite power more than merely 
infinity of number, infinity of sorts and orders ? 
Let him have created this infinity of infinites, 
still there is space in the imagination for the 
creation of finites ; but instead of these, let him 
again create infinites ; yet still the same space is 
left, it is no way filled up. I feel, too, that the 
whole rests on a miserable sophism of applying 
to an Almighty Being such words as all. Why 
were not all Gods ? But there is no all in crea- 
tion. It is composed of infinites, and the imagi- 
nation, bewildered by heaping infinites on infinites 
and wearying of demanding increase of number 
to a number which it conceives already infinite, 
deserted by images and mocked by words, whose 
sole substance is the inward sense of difficulty 
that accompanies all our notions of infinity ap- 
plied to numbers, turns with delight to distinct 
images and clear ideas, contemplates a world., an 
harmonious system, where an infinity of kinds 
subsist each in a multitude of individuals appor- 
tionate to its kind in conformity to laws existing 
in the divine nature, and therefore in the nature 
of things. We cannot, indeed, prove this in any 
other way than by finding it as impossible to 
deny omnif orm, as eternal, agency to God — by 
finding it impossible to conceive that an omni- 
scient Being should not have a distinct idea of 
finite beings, or that distinct ideas in the mind of 
God shoidd be without the perfection of real 
existence, that is, imperfect. But this is a proof 
32 



ANIMA POET^ 

subtle indeed, yet not more so than the difficulty. 
The intellect that can start the one can under- 
stand the other, if his vices do not prevent him. 
Admit for a moment that " conceive " is equiva- 
lent to creation in the divine nature, synony- 
mous with " to beget "(a feeling which has given 
to marriage a mysterious sanctity and sacramen- 
tal significance in the mind of many great and 
good men) — admit this, and all difficulty ceases, 
all tumult is hushed, all is clear and beautiful. 
We sit in the dark, but each by the side of his 
little fire, in his own group, and lo ! the summit 
of the distant mountain is smitten with light. 
All night long it has dwelt there, and we look at 
it and know that the sun is not extinguished, 
that he is elsewhere briglit and vivifying, that 
he is coming to us, to make our fires needless ; 
yet, even now, that our cold and darkness are so 
called only in comparison with the heat and light 
of the coming day, never wholly deserted of the 
rays. 

This I wrote on Friday morning, forty minutes 
past three o'clock, the sky covered with one 
cloud that yet lies in dark and light shades, and 
though one smooth cloud, by the dark color it 
appears to be ^tei^i^y. 

Dozing, dreamt of Hartley as at his christen- a dream 
ing, — how, as he was asked who redeemed him, ^^^^. 
and was to say, " God the Son," he went on ™^^i« 
humming and hawing in one hum and haw (like mornin!?, 
a boy who knows a thing and will not make the ^ ° '^*°'^^ 
effort to recollect) so as to irritate me greatly. 
Awakening gradually, I was able completely to 
detect that it was the ticking of my watch, which 
33 



ANIMA POET^ 

lay in the pen-place in my desk, on the round 
table close by my ear, and which, in the diseased 
state of my nerves, had fretted on my ears. I 
caught the fact while Hartley's face and moving 
lips were yet before my eyes, and his hum and 
haw and the ticking of the watch were each the 
other, as often happens in the passing off of 
sleep, — that curious modification of ideas by each 
other which is the element of hidls. I arose in- 
stantly and wrote it down. It is now ten minutes 
past five. 

To return to the question of evil, — woe to 
the man to whom it is an uninteresting question, 
though many a mind over-wearied by it may 
shun it with dread. And here — N. B. — 
scourged with deserved and lofty scorn those 
critics who laugh at the discussion of old ques- 
tions : God, right and wrong, necessity and arbit- 
rement, evil, etc. No ! forsooth, the question 
must be neio, spicy, hot gingerbread, from a 
French constitution to a balloon, change of min- 
istry, or, Which had the best of it in the parlia- 
mentary duel, Wyndham or Sheridan ? or, at the 
best, a chymical thing, [or] whether the new celes- 
tial bodies shall be called planets or asteroids, 
— something new [it must be], something out 
of themselves, — for whatever is in them is deep 
within them — must be old as elementary nature, 
[but] to find no contradiction in the union of old 
and novel — to contemplate the Ancient of Days 
with feelings new as if they then sjsrang forth at 
His own Fiat — this marks the mind that feels 
the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel 
it. But to return to the question. The whole 
34 



ANIMA POET^ 

rests on the sophism of imaginary change in a 
case of jsositive substitution. This, I fully be- 
lieve, settles the question. The assertion that 
there is in the essence of the divine nature a 
necessity of omniform harmonious action, and 
that order and system (not number — in itself 
base, disorderly, and irrational) define the crea- 
tive energy, determine, and employ it, and that 
nimaber is subservient to order, regulated, or- 
ganized, made beautiful and rational, an object 
both of imagination and intellect by order, — 
this is no mere assertion, it is strictly in harmony 
with the fact. For the world appears so, and it 
is proved by whatever proves the being of God. 
Indeed, it is involved in the idea of God. 

What is it that I employ my metaphysics on ? the aim 
To perplex our clearest notions and living moral meta- 
instincts? To extinguish the light of love and ''"''^'^ 
of conscience, to put out the life of arbitre- 
ment, to make myself and others worthless, soul- 
less, Godless ? No, to expose the folly and the 
legerdemain of those who have thus abused the 
blessed organ of language, to support all old 
and venerable truths, to support, to kindle, to 
project, to make the reason spread light over our 
feelings, to make our feelings diffuse vital warmth 
through our reason, — these are my objects and 
these my subjects. Is this the raetaphysic that 
bad spirits in hell delight in ? 

The voice of the Greta and the cock-crowing, in the 
The voice seems to grow like a flower on or oT^'^'L^ 
about the water beyond the bridge, while the ?t^^"'^, M 

■1 ... ° iNov. 2, 

cock-crowmg is nowhere particular, — it is at i«oa, 
35 



ANIMA POET^ 

Wednes- any place I imagine and do not distinctly see. 
iiig!i 20*^°" -A. most remarkable sky ! tke moon, now waned 
"!^t"'>^^ to a perfect ostrich egg, hangs over our house 
o'clock almost, only so much beyond it, garden-ward, 
that I can see it, holding my head out of the 
smaller study window. The sky is covered with 
whitish and with dingy cloudage, thin dingiest 
scud close under the moon, and one side of it 
moving, all else moveless ; but there are two 
great breaks of blue sky, the one stretches over 
our house and away toward Castlerigg, and this 
is speckled and blotched with white cloud ; the 
other hangs over the road, in the line of the 
road, in the shape of an ellipse or shuttle, I do 
not know what to call it, — this is unspeckled, 
all blue, three stars in it, — more in the former 
break, all unmoving. The water leaden-white, 
even as the gray gleam of water is in latest twi- 
light. Now while I have been writing this and 
gazing between whiles (it is forty minutes past 
two), the break over the road is swallowed up, 
and the stars gone ; the break over the house is 
narrowed into a rude circle, and on the edge of 
its circumference one very bright star. See ! al- 
ready the white mass, thinning at its edge, Jights 
with its brilliance. See ! it has bedimmed it, 
and now it is gone, and the moon is gone. The 
cock-crowing too has ceased. The Greta sounds 
on forever. But I hear only the ticking of my 
watch in the pen-place of my writing-desk and 
the far lower note of the noise of the fire, per- 
petual, yet seeming uncertain. It is the low 
voice of quiet change, of destruction doing its 
work by little and little. 

36 



ANIMA POET^ 

O ! the impudence of those who dare hold auei 
property to be the great binder-up of the affec- fames 
tions of the young to the okl, etc., and Godwin's 
folly in his book ! Two brothers in this country 
fought in the mourning - coach, and stood with 
black eyes and their black clothes all blood over 
their father's grave. 

s. Poor Miss Dacre ! born with a spinal deform- early 
ity that prophesied the early death it occasioned. Novem- 
Such are generally gentle and innocent beings. ^^^' ^^"^^ 
God seems to stamp on their foreheads the seal 
of death, in sign of appropriation. No evil 
dares approach the sacred hieroglyphic on this 
seal of redemption ; we on earth interpret early 
death, but the heavenly spirits, that minister 
around us, read in it " Abiding innocence." 

1 Something to me delicious in the thought that 
one who dies a baby presents to the glorified 
Saviour and Redeemer that same sweet face of 
infancy which He blessed when on earth, and 
sanctified with a kiss, and solemnly pronounced 
to be the type and sacrament of regeneration. 

The town, with lighted windows and noise of the 
the dogged passengers in the streets, — sound of side of 
the unseen river. Mountains scarcely perceiv- November 
able except by eyes long used to them, and sup- ^' Wednes- 

X 1 1 .1 • c a ■ . ^ day mght, 

ported by the images oi memory nowmg ni on 45 min. 

the impulses of immediate impression. On the ^ 

sky, black clouds ; two or three dim, untwinkling 

stars, like full stops on damp paper, and large 

stains and spreads of sullen white, like a tunic 

of white wool seen here and there through a torn 

37 



ANIMA POETzE 

and tattered cloak of black. Whence do these 
stains of white proceed all over the sky, so long 
after sunset, and, from their indifference of place 
in the sky, seemingly unaffected by the west ? 



November 
10, i past 
2 o'clock, 
morniug 



Tuesday 
night, 
I after 7 



Awoke, after long struggles, from a persecut- 
ing dream. The tale of the dream began in two 
images, in two sons of a nobleman, desperately 
fond of shooting, brought out by the footman to 
resign their property, and to be made believe 
that they had none. They were far too cunning 
for that, and as they struggled and resisted their 
cruel wrongers, and my interest for them, I sup- 
pose, increased, I became they, — the duality 
vanished, — Boyer and Christ's Hospital became 
concerned ; yet, still, the former story was kept 
up, and I was conjuring him, as he met me in 
the street, to have pity on a nobleman's orphan, 
when I was carried up to bed, and was strug- 
gling up against some unknown impediment, — 
when a noise of one of the doors awoke me. 
Drizzle ; the sky uncouthly marbled with white 
vapors and large black clouds, their surface of 
a fine woolly grain, but in the height and key- 
stone of the arch a round space of sky with dim 
watery stars, like a friar's crown ;, the seven 
stars in the central seen through white vapor 
that, entirely shapeless, gave a whiteness to the 
circle of the sky, but stained with exceedingly 
thin and subtle flakes of black vapor, might be 
happily said in language of Boccace (describing 
Demogorgon, in his Genealogia De Gli Dei) to 
be vestito tZ' tina jmllldezza affumicata. 

The sky covered with stars, the wind up, — 
right opposite my window, over Brandelhow, as 
38 



ANIMA POET^ 

its centre, and extending from the gorge to 
Wliinlatter, an enormous black cloud, exactly in 
the shape of an egg, — this, the only cloud in all 
the sky, impressed me with a demoniacal gran- 
deur. O, for change of weather ! 

The sky, in ui3on Grysdale Pike and onward Sunday 
to the Withop Fells, floored with flat, smooth, No™i;i^' 
dark or dingy clouds, elsewhere starry. Though ^ ^^^ " 
seven stars and all the rest in the height of the 
heaven be dimmed, those in the descent bright 
and frosty. ' The river has a loud voice, self- 
biographer of to-day's rain and thunder-showers. 
The owls are silent ; they have been very musi- 
cal. All weathers on Saturday the twelfth, storm 
and frost, sunshine, lightning, and what not ! 
God be praised, though sleepless, am marvel- 
lously bettered, and I take it for granted that 
the barometer has risen. I have been reading 
Barrow's treatise "On the Pope's Supremacy," 
and have made a note on the L^Estrangeistn of 
his style whenever his thoughts rendered it pos- 
sible for the words to be pert, frisky, and vulgar, 
— which, luckily, could not be often, from the 
gravity of his subjects, the solidity and appro- 
priateness of his thoughts, and that habitual 
geometrical j^^^cision of mind which demanded 
the most approjniate words. lie seems to me 
below South in dignity ; at least. South never 
sinks so low as B. sometimes. 



CAL DE- 
:^UbION 



A pretty optical fact occurred this morning, an opti- 
As I was returning from Fletcher's, up the back i^x 
lane and just in sight of the river, I saw, float- 
ing high in the air, somewhere over Mr. Banks's, 
a noble kite. I continued gazing at it for some 
39 



ANIMA POET^ 

time, when, turning suddenly round, I saw at 
an equi-distanee on my right, that is, over the 
middle of our field, a pair of kites floating 
about. I looked at them for some seconds, 
when it occurred to me that I had never before 
seen two kites together, and instantly the vision 
disappeared. It was neither more nor less than 
two pair of leaves, each pair on a separate stalk, 
on a young fruit tree that grew on the other side 
of the wall, not two yards from my eye. The 
leaves being alternate, did, when I looked at 
them as leaves, strikingly resemble wings, and 
they were the only leaves on the tree. The mag- 
nitude was given by the imagined distance, that 
distance by the former adjustment of the eye, 
which remained in consequence of the deep im- 
pression, the length of time I had been looking 
at the kite, the pleasure, etc., and [the fact that] 
a new object [had] impressed itself on the eye. 

In Plotinus the system of the Quakers is most 
beautifully expressed in the fifth book of the 
Fifth Ennead (he is speaking of " the inward 
light ") : " It is not lawful to inquire from 
whence it originated, for it neither approached 
hither, nor again departs from hence to some 
other place, but it either appears to us, or does 
not appear. So that we ought not to j)ursue it 
as if with a view of discerning its latent original, 
but to abide in quiet till it suddenly shines upon 
us, preparing ourselves for the blessed spectacle, 
like the eye waiting for the rising sun." 

PARS AL- My nature requires another nature for its sup- 
TEKA MEi pQj.^;^ and reposes only in another from the neces- 

40 



THK 

INWARD 

LIGHT 



THE GOOD 



ANIMA POET^ 

sary indigence of its being. Intensely similar 
yet not the same [must that other be] ; or, may 
I venture to say, the same indeed, but dissimilar, 
as the same breath sent with the same force, the 
same pauses, and the same melody pre-imaged in 
the mind, into the flute and the clarion shall be 
the same soul diversely incarnate. 

" All things desire that which is first from a not the 
necessity of nature, prophesying, as it were, that ful but 
they cannot subsist without the energies of that 
first nature. But beauty is not first, it happens 
only to intellect, and creates restlessness and 
seeking ; but good, which is present from the 
beginning and unceasingly to our innate appe- 
tite, abides with us even in sleep, and never 
seizes the mind with astonishment, and requires 
no peculiar reminiscence to convince us of its 
presence." — Plotinus. 

This is just and profound, yet perfect beauty 
being an abstract of good, in and for that par- 
ticular form excites in me no passion but that of 
an admiration so quiet as scarcely to admit of 
the name passion., but one that, participating in 
the same root of soul, does yet spring up with 
excellences that I have not. To this I am driven 
by a desire of self-completion with a restless in- 
extinguishable love. God is not all things, for 
in this case He would be indigent of all ; but all 
things are God, and eternally indigent of God. 
And in the original meaning of the essence as 
predicable of that concerning which you can say, 
This is he, or That is he (this or that rather than 
any other), in this sense of the word essence, I 
perfectly coincide with the Platonists and Ploti- 
41 



ANIMA POETiE 



nists that, if we add to the nature of God either 
essence or intellect or beauty, we deprive Him of 
being the Good himself, the only One, the purely 
and absolutely One. 



A MOON 
SET 



After a night of storm and rain, the sky calm 
Friday, and white, by blue vapor thinning into formless- 
^Q3" ^^' ness instead of clouds, the mountains of height 
morning, covered with snow, the secondary mountains 

45 minutes . 

past 2 black. The moon descending aslant the \/a, 
through the midst of which the great road 
winds, set exactly behind Whinlatter Point, 
marked a. She being an egg, somewhat un- 
couthly shaped, perhaps, but an ostrich's egg 
rather than any other (she is two nights more 
than a half -moon), she set behind the black 
point, fitted herself on to it like a cap of fire, 
then became a crescent, then a mountain of fire 
in the distance, then the peak itself on fire, one 
steady flame ; then stars of the first, second, and 
third magnitude, and vanishing, upboiled a swell 
of light, and in the next second the whole sky, 
which had been sahle blue around the yellow 
moon, whitened and brightened for as large a 
space, as would take the moon half an hour to 
descend throujrh. 



THE 
DEATH 
OF ADAM 
A DREAM 

Dec. 6, 
1803 



Adam, travelling in his old age, came to a set 
of the descendants of Cain, ignorant of the origin 
of the world, and, treating him as a madman, 
killed him. A sort of dream which I had this 
niffht. 



A MAN 's A We ought to suspect reasoning founded wholly 
A' THAT on the difference of man from man, not on their 

42 



FENCE OF 

META- 

PHYSIC 



ANIMA POET^ 

commonnesses, which are infinitely greater. So 
I doubt the wisdom of the treatment of sailors 
and criminals, because it is wholly grounded on 
their vices, as if the vices formed the whole or 
major part of their being. 

^^ Abstruse reasoning is to the inductions of com- a de- 
mon sense what reaping is to delving. But the """" 
implements with which we reap, how are they 
gained? By delving. Besides, what is common 
sense now was abstract reasoning with earlier ages. 

A beautiful sunset, the sun setting behind New- a sunset 
lands across the foot of the lake. The sky is ^'^''''^^^ 
cloudless, save that there is a cloud on Skiddaw, 
one on the highest mountains in Borrowdale, 
some on Helvellyn, and that the sun sets in a 
glorious cloud. These clouds are of various shapes, 
various colors, and belong to their movmtains 

and have nothing to do with the sky. N. B. 

There is something metallic, silver playfully and 
imperfectly gilt and highly polished, or, rather, 
something mother-of-pearlish, in the sun-gleams 
on ice, thin ice. 

I have repeatedly said that I could make a extremes 
volume if only I had noted down, as they occurred ^^^"^ 
to my recollection, the instances of the proverb 
" Extremes Meet." This night, Sunday, Decem- 
ber 11, 1803, half past eleven, I have determined 
to devote the last nine pages of my pocket-book 
to a collection of the same. 

The parching' air 
Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire. 

Paradise Lost, ii. 594. 

43 



ABSTRUSE 
RESEARCH 



ANIMA POETvE 

2. Insects by their smallness, the mammoth 
by its hugeness, terrible. 

3. In the foam-islands in a fiercely boiling 
pool, at the bottom of a waterfall, there is same- 
ness from infinite change. 

4. The excess of humanity and disinterested- 
ness in polite society, the desire not to give pain, 
for example, not to talk of your own diseases and 
misfortunes, and to introduce nothing but what 
will give pleasure, destroy all humanity and dis- 
interestedness, by making it intolerable, through 
desuetude, to listen to the complaints of our 
equals, or of any, where the listening does not 
gratify or excite some vicious pride and sense of 
superiority. 

5. It is difficult to say whether a perfectly un- 
heard-of subject or a crambe his cocta, if chosen 
by a man of genius, would excite in the higher 
degree the sense of novelty. Take, as an in- 
stance of the latter, the Orestes of Sotheby. 

6. Dark with excess of light. 

7. Self - absorption and worldly - mindedness. 
(N. B. — The latter a most philosoj)hical word.) 

8. The dim intellect sees an absolute oneness, 
the perfectly clear intellect knowingly perceives 
it. Distinction and plurality lie in the betwixt. 

9. The naked savage and the gymnosophist. 

10. Nothing and intensest absolute being. 

11. Despotism and ochlocracy. 

A dirty business ! " How," said I, with a great 
effort to conquer my laziness and a great wish to 
rest in the generality — " what do you include un- 
der the words ' dirty business ' ? " I note this in 
44 



ANIMA POET^ 

order to remember the reluctance tlie mind has • 
in general to analysis. 

The soul within the body — can I, anyway, 
compare this to the reflection of the fire seen 
through my window on the solid wall, seeming, 
of course, within the solid wall, as deep within 
as the distance of the fire from the wall. I fear 
I can make nothing out of it ; but why do I al- 
ways hurry away from any interesting thought to 
do something uninteresting? As, fot instance, 
when this thought struck me, I turned off my at- 
tention suddenly and went to look for the copy 
of Wolff which I had missed. Is it a cowardice 
of all deep feeling, even though pleasurable ? or 
is it laziness ? or is it something less obvious than 
either ? Is it connected with my epistolary em- 
barrassments ? 

[" The window of my library at Keswick is 
opposite to the fireplace. At the coming on of 
evening, it was my frequent amusement to watch 
the image or reflection of the fire that seemed 
burning in the bushes or between the trees in 
different parts of the garden." — Tlie Friend. 
Coleridge^ & Worhs., ii. 135.] 

As I was sitting at the foot of my bed, reading 
with my face downwards, I saw a phantom of my 
face upon the nightcap which lay just on the mid- 
dle of my pillow, it was indistinct but of bright 
colors, and came only as my head bent low. 
Was it the action of the rays of my face upon 
my eyes ? that is, did my eyes see my face, and 
from the sidelong and faint action of the rays 
place the image in that situation ? But I moved 
the nightcap and I lost it. 
45 



ANIMA POET^ 

Dee. 19, I have only to shut my eyes to feel how 

morning ignorant I am whence these forms and colored 
forms, and colors distinguishable beyond what 
I can distinguish, derive their birth. These vary- 
ing and infinite co-present colors, what are they ? 
I ask, to what do they belong in my waking re- 
membrance ? and almost never receive an answer. 
Only I perceive and know that whatever I 
change, in any part of me, produces some change 
in these eye-spectra ; as, for instance, if I press 
my legs or change sides. 

OF I will at least make the attempt to explain to 

AssociA- myself the origin of moral evil from the streamy 
''^^^ nature of association, which thinking curbs and 

rudders. Do not the bad passions in dreams 
throw light and show of proof upon this hypothe- 
sis ? If I can but explain those passions I shall 
gain light, I am sure. A clue ! a clue ! a Heca- 
tomb a la Pythagoras, if it unlabyrinth me. 

December I note the beautiful luminous shadow of my 
ii'o'dock pencil point which follows it from the candle, 
or rather goes before it and illuminates the word 
I am writing. But, to resume, take in the bless- 
edness of innocent children, the blessedness of 
sweet sleep, do they or do they not contradict 
the argument of evil from streamy associations ? 
I hope not, but all is to be thought over and 
into. And what is the height and ideal of mere 
association? Delirium. But how far is this 
state produced by pain and denaturalization? 
And what are these ? In short, as far as I can 
see anything in this total mist, vice is imperfect 
yet existing volition, giving diseased currents of 
46 



ANIMA POET^ 

association, because it yields on all sides and 
yet is — so, too, think of madness ! 

December 30th, half past one o'clock, or, a doubt- 
rather, Saturday morning, December 31st, put pekimeni 
rolled bits of paper, many tiny bits of wick, some 
tallow, and the soap together. The whole flame, 
equal in size to half a dozen candles, did not 
give the light of one, and the letters of the book 
looked by the unsteady flare just as through 
tears or in dizziness — every line of every letter 
dislocated into angles, or like the mica in crum- 
bly stones. 

The experiment over leaf illustrates my idea the psy- 

- . 1 ,1 , •. • 1 CHOLOGY 

of motion, namely, that it is a presence and of mo- 
absence rapidly alternating, so that the fits of "^^^^ 
absence exist continuously in the feeling, and 
the fits of presence vice versa continuedly in the 
eye. Of course I am speaking of motion psy- 
chologically, not physically, what it is in us, not 
what the supposed mundane cause may be. I 
believe that what we call motion is our conscious- 
ness of motion arising from the interruption of 
motion, the action of the soul in suffering resist- 
ance. Free unresisted action, the going forth 
of the soul, life without consciousness, is, pro- 
perly, infinite, that is unlimited. For whatever 
resists limits, and whatever is unresisted, is un- 
limited. This, psychologically speaking, is space, 
while the sense of resistance or limitation is 
time, and motion is a synthesis of the two. The 
closest approach of time to space forms co-exist- 
ent multitude. 

47 



LECTION 
AND 
KEMEM- 
BRANCE 



ANIMA POET^ 

EEcoL- There is an important distinction between the 

memory or reminiscent faculty of sensation which 
young children seem to possess in so small a 
degree, from their perpetual desire to have a tale 
repeated to them, and the memory of words and 
images which the very same children manifestly 
possess in an unusual degree, even to sealing-wax 
accuracy of retention and representation. 



ETHICS 
OF SPI- 
NOZA 



THE If Spinoza had left the doctrine of miracles 

untouched, and had not written so powerfully in 
support of universal toleration, his ethics would 
never have brought on him the charge of Athe- 
ism. His doctrine, in this respect, is truly and 
severely orthodox, in the reformed Church ; 
neither do I know that the Church of Rome 
has authoritatively decided between the Spino- 
sists and Scotists in their great controversy on 
the nature of the being which creatures possess. 



A uNiTA- Creation is exj)lained by Joannes Scotus 
SCHOOL- Erigena as only a manifestation of the unity of 
"^^ God in forms — etfit et facit, et creat et creatur. 

Lib. 4. p. 7. 

P. 8. A curious and highly-philosophical ac- 
count of the Trinity, and completely Unitarian. 
God is, is wise, and is living. The essence we 
call Father, the wisdom Son, the life the Holy 
Spirit. And he positively affirms that these three 
exist only as distinguishable relations — habitu- 
dines ; and he states the whole doctrine to be an 
invention and condescension of Theology to the 
intellect of man, which must define^ and conse- 
quently personify^ in order to understand, and 
must have some phantom of understanding in 
48 



ANIMA POETiE 

order to keep alive in the heart the substantial 
faith. They are fuel to the sacred fire — in the 
empyrean it may burn without fuel, and they 
who do so are seraphs. 

A fine epitheton of man would be " Lord of a crowd 
fire and light." All other creatures whose ex- thoughts 
istence we perceive are mere alms-receivers of 
both. 

A company of children driving a hungry, hard- 
skinned ass out of a corn-field. The ass cannot 
by such weaklings be driven so hard but he will 
feed as he goes. 

Such light as lovers love, when the waxing 
moon steals in behind a black, black cloud, 
emerging soon enough to make the blush visible 
which the long kiss had kindled. 

All notions [remain] hushed in the phantasms 
of place and time that still escape the finest sieve 
and most searching winnow of our reason and 
abstraction. 

A rosemary tree, large as a timber tree, is a 
sweet sign of the antiquity and antique manners 
of the house against which it groweth. Rose- 
mary (says Parkinson, Theatrum Botanlcum, 
Loudon, 1640, p. 76) is an herb of as great use 
with us in these days as any whatsoever, not 
only for physical but civil purposes — the civil 
uses, as all know, are at weddings, funerals, etc., 
to bestow on friends. 

49 



ANIMA POET^ 

Great liarm is done by bad poets In trivializ- 
ing beautiful expressions and images and asso- 
ciating disgust and indifference with the techni- 
cal forms of poetry. 

Advantage of public schools. [They teach 
men to be] content with school praise when they 
publish. Apply this to Cottle and J. Jennings. 

Religious slang operates better on women than 
on men. N. B. — Why ? I will give over — it 
is not tanti ! 

Poem. Ghost of a mountain — the forms, 
seizing my body as I passed, became realities — 
I a ghost, till I had reconquered my substance. 

The sopha of sods. Lack-wit and the clock — 
find him at last in the Yorkshire cave, where the 
waterfall is. 

[The reference is, no doubt, to "Wordsworth's 
Idiot Boy, which was composed at Nether 
Stowey, in 1798. In a letter addressed to John 
Wilson, of June 5, 1802, Wordsworth discusses 
and discards the use of the word "lackwit" as 
an equivalent to " idiot." The " Sopha of Sods " 
was on Latrigg. In her journal for August, 
1800, Dorothy Wordsworth records the making 
of a seat on Windybrow, a part of Latrigg. 
Possibly this was the " Sopha of Sods." — Life 
of W. Wordsworth, 1889, i. 268, 403.] 

The old stump of the tree, with briar-roses and 
bramble leaves wreathed round and round — a 
bramble arch — a foxglove in the centre. 
50 



ANIMA POET^ 

The palm, still faithful to forsaken deserts, an 
emblem of hope. 

^ The steadfast rainbow in the fast-moving, fast- 
hurrying hail-mist ! What a congregation of 
images and feelings, of fantastic permanence 
amidst the rapid change of tempest — quietness 
the daughter of storm. 

I would make a pilgrimage to the deserts of " poem on 
Arabia to find the man who could make me or on ' 
understand how the one can he many. Eternal, ^"^^^"^ 
universal mystery ! It seems as if it were impos- 
sible, yet it is, and it is everywhere ! It is in- 
deed a contradiction in terms, and only in terms. 
It is the co-presence of feeling and life, limit- 
less by their very essence, with form by its very 
essence limited, determinable, definite. 

Meditate on trans-substantiation ! What a tran- 
conception of a miracle ! Were one a Catholic, tiation 
what a sublime oration might one not make of 
it. Perpetual, Travtopical, yet offering no violence 
to the sense, exercising no domination over the 
free-will — a miracle always existing, yet per- 
ceived only by an act of the free-will — the beau- 
tiful fuel of the fire of faith — the fire must be 
preexistent or it is not fuel, yet it feeds and sup- 
ports, and is necessary to feed and support, the 
fire that converts it into his own nature. 



Errors beget opposite errors, for it is our im- the 
perfect nature to run into extremes. But this of the 
trite, because ever-recurring, truth is not the ^^^^^ 
whole. Alas! those are endangered who have 
51 



ANIMA POET^ 

avoided the extremes, as if among the Tartars, 
in opposition to a faction that had unnaturally 
lengthened their noses into monstrosity, there 
should arise another who had cut off theirs flat 
to the face, Socinians in physiognomy. The few 
who retained their noses as nature made them, 
and reason dictated, would assuredly be perse- 
cuted by the noseless party as adherents of the 
rhinocerotists or monster-nosed men, which is the 
case of those apxaa-marTat [braves] of the English 
Church, called Evangelicals. Excess of Cal- 
vinism produced Arminianism, and those not in 
excess must therefore be Calvinists ! 

ALAS ! To a former friend who pleaded how near he 

THEY HAD f Qj^j^^g^^y j^r^^j jjecu, how ucar and close a friend ! 
Yes ! you were, indeed, near to my heart and 
native to my soul — a part of my being and its 
natural, even as the chaff to corn. But since 
that time, through whose fault I will be mute, I 
have been thrashed out by the flail of experience. 
Because you have been, therefore, never more 
can you be a part of the grain. 

Oct. 31, The full moon glided behind a black cloud. 

^^1 And what then ? and who cared ? It was past 

PHffiBE seven o'clock in the morning. There is a small 

IMPEKA- 111 

TOR cloud in the east, not larger than the moon, and 

ten times brighter than she ! So passes night, 
and all her favors vanish in our minds ungrate- 
ful ! 



BEEN 
FRIENDS 
IN YOUTH 



THE ONE 
AND THE 
GOOD 



In the chapter on abstract ideas I might in- 
troduce the subject by quoting the eighth Prop- 
osition of Proclus' Elements of Theology. The 
62 



AGONY OF 
THOUGHT 



ANIMA POET^ 

whole of religion seems to me to rest on and in 
the question : The One and The Good — are 
these words or realities? I long to read the 
schoolmen on the subject. 

There are thoughts that seem to give me a a mortal 
power over my own life. I could kill myself 
by persevering in the thought. Mem., to de- 
scribe as accurately as may be the approximating 
symptoms. I met something very like this ob- 
servation where I should least have expected 
such a coincidence of sentiment, such sympathy 
with so wild a feeling of mine — in p. 71 of 
Blount's translation of The Spani&h Rogue, 
1623. 

[I have been unable to trace the reference, as 
Edward Blount's translation of Aleman's Guz- 
man de AJfarache is not in the British Mu- 
seum.] 

53 



CHAPTER III. 



THE 

UNDISCI 

PLINED 



I8O4. 

Home-sickness is no baby-pang. — S. T. C. 

This evening, and indeed all tliis day, I ouglit 
to have been reading and filling the margins of 
'^^^^ Malthus. [" An Essay on the Principles of 
Population," etc., London, 1803, 4to. The copy 
annotated by Coleridge is now in the British 
Museum.] 

I had begun and found it pleasant. Why did 
I neglect it ? Because I ought not to have done 
this. The same applies to the reading and writ- 
ing of letters, essays, etc. Surely this is well 
worth a serious analysis, that, by understanding, 
I may attempt to heal it. For it is a deep and 
wide disease in my moral nature, at once elm- 
and-oak-rooted. Is it love of liberty, of spon- 
taneity, or what ? These all express, but do not 
explain, the fact. 
Tuesday After I had got into bed last night I said to 
Ja^mary'i, myself that I had been pompously enunciating 
as a difficulty a problem of easy and common 
solution, — viz., that it was the effect of associa- 
tion. From infancy up to manhood, under par- 
ents, schoolmasters, inspectors, etc., our pleasures 
and pleasant self-chosen pursuits (self-chosen 
because pleasant, and not originally pleasant 
because self-chosen) have been forcibly inter- 
rupted, and dull, imintelligible rudiments or 
painful tasks imposed upon us instead. Now all 
54 



1804 



ANIMA POET^ 

duty is felt as a command., and every command 
is of the nature of an offence. Duty, therefore, 
by the law of association being felt as a com- 
mand from without, would naturally call up the 
sensation of the pain roused from the commands 
of parents and schoolmasters. But I awoke this 
morning at half past one, and as soon as disease 
permitted me to think at all, the shallowness and 
sophistry of this solution flashed upon me at 
once. I saw that the phenomenon occurred far, 
far too early ; I have observed it in infants of 
two or three months old, and in Hartley I have 
seen it turned up and laid bare to the unarmed 
eye of the merest common sense. The fact is, 
that interruption of itself is painful, because, and 
as far as, it acts as disruption. And thus with- 
out any reference to, or distinct recollection of, 
my former theory I saw great reason to attribute 
the effect, wholly, to the streamy nature of the 
associative faculty, and the more, as it is evident 
that they labor under this defect who are most 
reverie-ish and streamy — Hartley, for instance, 
and myself. This seems to me no common cor- 
roboration of my former thought or the origin of 
moral evil in general. 

A time will come when passiveness will attain cogi- 
the dignity of worthy activity, when men shall labo- 
be as proud within themselves of having re- ^^^^ 
mained in a state of deep tranquil emotion, 
whether in reading or in hearing or in looking, as 
they now are in having figured away for an hour. 
Oh ! how few can transmute activity of mind 
into emotion ! Yet they are as active as the 
stirring tempest, and playful as the may-blossom 
55 



TARE EST 



ANIMA POET^ 

in a breeze of May, who can yet for hours to- 
gether remain with hearts broad awake, and 
the understanding asleep in all but its retentive- 
ness and receptivity. Yea, and (in) the latter 
(state of mind) evince as great genius as in the 
former. 



A SHEAF 
OF ANEC- 
DOTES 

Sunday 
morning, 
Feb. 5, 
1804 



Sunday 
morning, 
Feb. 13, 
1804 



I called on Charles Lamb, fully expecting him 
to be out, and intending all the way to write to 
him. I found him at home, and, while sitting and 
talking to him, took the pen and note-paper and 
began to write. 

As soon as Holcroft heard that Mary Woll- 
stonecraft was dead, he took a chaise and came 
with incredible speed to " have Mrs. Godwin 
opened for a remarkable woman " ! 

Lady Beaumont told me that when she was a 
child, previously to her saying her prayers, she 
endeavored to think of a mountain or great river, 
or something great, in order to raise up her soul 
and kindle it. 



Rickman has a tale about George Dyer and 
his "Ode to the Hero Race." "Your Aunt, 
Sir," said George to the Man of Figures, " your 
Aunt Is a very sensible woman. Why I read, 
Sir, my Ode to her, and she said that it was a 
very pretty Thing, There are very few women, 
Sir ! that possess that fine discrimination, Sir ! " 

The huge Organ Pipe at Exeter, larger than 
the largest at Haarlem, at first was dumb. Green 
determined to make it speak, and tried all means 
56 



ANIMA POET^ 

in vain, till at last he made a second pipe pre- 
cisely alike, and placed it at its side. Then it 
spoke. 

Sir George Beaumont found great advantage 
in learning to draw from Nature through gauze 
spectacles. 

At Gottingen, at Blumenbach's lectures on 
Psychology, when some anatomical preparations 
were being handed round, there came in and 
seated himself by us Englishmen a Hosjntator^ 
one, that is, who attends one or two lectures 
unbidden and unforbidden and gratis, as a 
stranger, and on a claim, as it were, of hospital- 
ity. This Hospes was the uncouthest, strangest 
fish, pretending to human which I ever beheld. 
I turned to Greenough, and "Who broke his 
bottle ? " I whispered. 

Godwin and Holcroft went together to Under- 
wood's chambers. "Little Mr. Underwood," 
said they, " we are perfectly acquainted with the 
subject of your studies, only ignorant of the 
particulars. What is the difference between a 
thermometer and a barometer ? " 

It is a pleasure to me to perceive the buddings the ado- 
of virtuous loves, to know -their minutes of ^^'^^''^^ 

« OF LOVE 

increase, their stealth and silent OTowinos. 

A pretty idea, that of a good soul watching 
the progress of an attachment from the first 
glance to the time when the lover himself be- 
comes conscious of it. A poem for my " Soother 
of Absence." 

57 



ANIMA POETiE 

THE KAGE To J. ToBiN, Esq., April 10, 1804. 

FOK^MONi- ^^^ ^^^ habitually enjoy robust health have, 
too generally, the trick, and a very cruel one it 
is, of imagining that they discover the secret of 
all their acquaintances' ill health in some mal- 
practice or other; and, sometimes, by gravely 
asserting this here, there, and everywhere (as 
who likes his penetration [hid] under a bushel?), 
they not only do all they can, without intending 
it, to deprive the poor sufferer of that sympathy 
which is always a comfort, and in some degree 
a support to human nature, but, likewise, too 
often implant serious alarm and uneasiness in the 
minds of the person's relatives and his nearest 
and dearest connections. Indeed (but that I 
have known its inutility, that I should be ridicu- 
lously sinning against my own law which I was 
propounding, and that those who are most fond 
of advising are the least able to hear advice 
from others, as the passion to command makes 
men disobedient), I should often have been on 
the point of advising you against the twofold 
rage of advising and of discussing character, 
both the one and the other of which infallibly 
generates presumption and blindness to our own 
faults. Nay! more particularly where, from 
whatever cause, there exists a slowness to under- 
stand, or an aptitude to mishear and consequently 
misunderstand, what has been said, it too often 
renders an otherwise truly good man a mischief- 
maker to an extent of which he is but little 
aware. Our friends' rej)utation should be a re- 
ligion to us, and when it is lightly sacrificed to 
what self -adulation calls a love of telling the truth 
(in reality a lust of talking something seasoned 
58 



ANIMA POET^ 

with the cayenne and capsicum of personality), 
depend upon it, something in the heart is warped 
or warping, more or less according to the greater 
or lesser power of the counteracting causes. I 
confess to you, that being exceedingly low and 
heart-fallen, I should have almost sunk under the 
operation of reproof and admonition (the whole, 
too, in my conviction, grounded on utter mistake) 
at the moment I was quitting, perhaps forever ! 
my dear country and all that makes it so dear — 
but the high esteem I cherish towards you, and 
my sense of your integrity and the reality of your 
attachment and concern blows upon me refresh- 
ingly as the sea-breeze on the tropic islander. 
Show me any one made better by blunt advice, 
and I may abate of my dislike to it, but I have 
experienced the good effects of the contrary in 
Wordsworth's conduct to me ; and, in Poole and 
others, have witnessed enough of its ill effects to 
be convinced that it does little else but harm 
both to the adviser and the advisee. 

[See Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 
Letter cli., ii. 474, 475.] 

This is Spain ! That is Africa ! Now, then, places 
I have seen Africa ! etc., etc. O ! the power of persons 
names to give interest. When I first sate down, Thursday, 

•i-n ^ e tap- . April 19, 

With Jiiiirope on my left and Africa on my right, 1804 
both distinctly visible, I felt a quickening of the 
movements in the blood, but still it felt as a 
pleasure of amusement rather than of thought or 
elevation ; and at the same time, and gradually 
winning on the other, the nameless silent forms of 
nature were working in me, like a tender thought 
in a man who is hailed merrily by some acquain- 
59 



ANIMA POET^ 

tance in his work, and answers it in tlie same 
tone. This is Africa ! That is Europe ! There 
is division, sharp boundary, abrupt change ! and 
what are they in nature ? Two mountain banks 
that make a noble river of the interfluent sea, 
not existing and acting with distinctness and 
manif oldness indeed, but at once and as one — no 
division, no change, no antithesis ! Of all men 
I ever knew, Wordsworth himself not excepted, 
I have the faintest pleasure in things contin- 
gent and transitory. I never, except as a forced 
courtesy of conversation, ask in a stagecoach. 
Whose house is that ? nor receive the least addi- 
tional pleasure when I receive the answer. Nay, 
it goes to a disease in me. As I was gazing at 
a wall in Caernarvon Castle, I wished the guide 
fifty miles off that was telling me. In this cham- 
ber the Black Prince was born (or whoever it 
was). I am not certain whether I should have 
seen with any emotion the mulberry-tree of 
Shakspere. If it were a tree of no notice in 
itself, I am sure that I should feel by an effort 
— with self-reproach at the dimness of the feel- 
ing ; if a striking tree, I fear that the pleasure 
would be diminished rather than increased, that 
I should have no unity of feeling, and find in 
the constant association of Shakspere having 
planted it an intrusion that prevented me from 
wholly (as a whole man) losing myself in the 
flexures of its branches and intertwining of its 
roots. No doubt there are times and conceiv- 
able circumstances in which the contrary would 
be true : in which the thought that under this 
rock by the seashore I know that Giordano 
Bruno hid himself from the pursuit of the en- 
60 



ANIMA POET-^ 

raged priesthood, and, overcome with the power 
and sublimity of the truths for which they sought 
his life, thought his life therefore given him that 
he might bear witness to the truths, and, morti 
ultro occurrens, returned and surrendered him- 
self ! So, here, on this bank Milton used to lie, in 
late May, when a young man, and familiar with 
all its primroses, made them yet dearer than their 
dear selves, by that sweetest line in the Lycidas, 
" And the rathe primrose that forsaken dies ; " or 
from this spot the immortal deer-stealer, on his 
escape from Warwickshire, had the first view of 
London, and asked himself, And what am I to 
do there ? At certain times, uncalled and sudden, 
subject to no bidding of my own or others, these 
thoughts would come upon me like a storm, and 
fill the place with something more than nature. 
But these are not contingent or transitory, they 
are nature, even as the elements are nature — 
yea, more to the human mind, for the mind has 
the power of absti-acting all agency from the 
former and considering [them] as mere effects 
and instruments. But a Shakspere, a Milton, 
a Bruno, exist in the mind as pure action, defe- 
cated of all that is material and passive. And 
the great moments that formed them — it is a 
kind of impiety against a voice within us, not to 
regard them as predestined, and therefore things 
of now, forever, and which were always. But it 
degrades the sacred feeling, and is to it what 
stupid superstition is to enthusiastic religion, 
when a man makes a pilgrimage to see a great 
man's shin-bone found unmouldered in his coffin. 
Perhaps the matter stands thus. I could feel 
amused by these things, and should be, if there 
61 



ANIMA POET^ 

had not been connected with the great name 
upon which the amusement wholly depends a 
higher and deeper pleasure, that will [not] endure 
the copresence of so mean a companion, while 
the mass of mankind, whether from nature or 
(as I fervently hope) from error of rearing 
and the world liness of their after-pursuits, are 
rarely susceptible of any other pleasures than 
those of amusement, gratification of curiosity, nov- 
elty, surprise, wonderment, from the glaring, the 
harshly-contrasted, the odd, the accidental, and 
find the reading of the Paradise Lost a task 
somewhat alleviated by a few entertaining inci- 
dents, such as the pandemonium and self-en- 
dwarf ment of the devils, the fool's paradise, and 
the transformation of the infernal court into 
serpents and of their intended applauses into 
hisses. 

["Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were 
exact, but harmonious opposites in this — that 
every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in 
his mind a host of historical or biographical 
association ; whereas, for myself, I believe I 
should walk over the plain of Marathon without 
taking more interest in it than in any other plain 
of similar features." — Tahle Talk, August 4, 
1833, Bell & Co., 1884, p. 242.] 

THE IN- Why do we so very, very often see men pass 

ANCE^oF ^^om one extreme to the other ? o-To^KapBia [Stod- 

coNVEETs ^art, for instance] . Alas ! they sought not the 

truth, but praise, self-importance, and above all 

[the sense of] something doing ! Disappointed, 

• they hate and persecute their former opinion, 

which no man will do who by meditation had 

62 



ANIMA POET^ 

adopted it, and in the course of unfeigned medi- 
tation gradually enlarged tlie circle and so get 
out of it. For in the perception of its falsehood 
he will form a perception of certain truths which 
had made the falsehood plausible, and can never 
cease to venerate his own sincerity of intention 
and Philalethie. For, perhaps, we never hate 
any opinion, or can do so, till we have imper- 
sonated it. We hate the persons because they 
oppose us, symbolize that opposition under the 
form and words of the opinion, and then hate the 
person for the opinion and the opinion for the 
person. 

[For some weeks after his arrival at Valetta 
Coleridge remained as the guest of Dr. John 
(afterwards Sir John) Stoddart, at that time 
H. M. Advocate at Malta.] 

Facts! Never be weary of discussing and facts and 
exposing the hoUowness of these. [For, in the ^^^^'*^^ 
first place,] every man [is] an accomplice on 
one side or the other, [and, secondly, there is] 
human testimony. "You were in fault, I hear," 
said B to C, and B had heard it from A. [Now] 
A had said, " And C, God bless her, was perhaps 
the innocent occasion ! " But what a trifle this 
to the generality of blunders ! 

[I have no pity or patience for that] blind- candor 
ness which comes from putting out your own nIme"for 
eyes and in mock humility refusing to form an *^^^^ 
opinion on the right and the wrong of a question. 
"If we say so of the Sicilians, why may not 
Buonaparte say this of the Swiss?" and so forth. 
As if England and France, Swiss and Sicilian, 
63 



ANIMA FOETJE 

were tlie x y z oi Algebra, naked names of un- 
known quantities. [What is this but] to fix 
morals without morality, and [to allow] general 
rules to supersede all particular thought ? And 
though it be never acted in reality, yet the 
opinion is pernicious. It kills public spirit and 
deadens national effort. 

A SIMILE The little point, or, sometimes, minim globe of 
flame remains on the [newly] lighted taper for 
three minutes or more unaltered. But see ! it is 
given over, and then at once the flame darts or 
plunges down into the wick, then up again, and 
all is bright — a fair cone of flame, with its 
black column in it, and minor cone, shadow- 
colored, resting upon the blue flame the common 
base of the two cones, that is, of the whole flame. 
A pretty, detailed simile in the manner of J, 
Taylor might be made of this, applying it to 
slow learners, to opportunities of grace mani- 
festly neglected and seemingly lost and useless. 

o STAR Monday evening, July 9, 1804, about eight 

o'clock. The glorious evening star coasted the 

\ moon, and at length absolutely crested its upper 

tip. ... It was the most singular and at the 
same time beautiful sight I ever beheld. Oh, 
that it could have appeared the same in Eng- 
land, at Grasmere ! 

jjEFAs EST In the Jacobinism of anti-Jacobins note the 

DocEKi dreariest feature of Jacobins, a contempt for the 

institutions of our ancestors and of past wisdom, 

which has generated Cobbetts and contempt of 

the liberty of the press and of liberty itself. 

64 



ANIMA POET.E 

Men are not wholly unmodified by the opinion 
of their fellow-men, even when they happen to 
be enemies or (still worse) of the opjDosite fac- 
tion. 

I saw in early youth, as in a dream, the birth the many 
of the planets ; and my eyes beheld as one what one 
the understanding- afterwards divided into (1) 
the origin of the masses, (2) the origin of their 
motions, and (3) the site or position of their cir- 
cles and ellipses. All the deviations, too, were 
seen as one intuition of one, the self-same neces- 
sity, and this necessity was a law of spirit, and 
all was spirit. And in matter all beheld the 
past activity of others or their own — and this 
reflection, this echo is matter — its only essence, 
if essence it be. And of this, too, I saw the 
necessity and understood it, but I understood 
not how infinite multitude and manifoldness 
could be one ; only I saw and understood that it 
was yet more out of my power to comprehend 
how it could be otherwise — and in this unity 
I worshipped in the depth of knowledge that 
passes all understanding the Being of all things 
— and in Being their sole goodness — and I saw 
that God is the One, the Good — possesses it 
not, but is it. 

The visibility of motion at a great distance is the wind- 
increased by all that increases the distinct visi- 
bility of the moving object. This Saturday, 
August 3, 1894, in the room immediately under 
the tower in St. Antonio, as I was musing on 
the difference, whether ultimate or only of de- 
gree, between auffassen and erhennen (an idea 
65 



ITS 
SHADOW 



ANIMA POET^ 

received and an Idea acquired) I saw on the top of 
the distant hills a shadow on the sunny ground 
moving very fast and wave-like, yet always 
in the same place, which I should have attrib- 
uted to the windmill close by, but the windmill 
(which I saw distinctly too) aj)peared at rest. 
On steady gazing, however (and most plainly 
with my spy-glass), I found that it was not at 
rest, but that this was its shadow. The windmill 
itself was white in the sunshine, and there were 
sunny white clouds at its back, the shadow black 
on the white ground. 

SYRACUSE In reflecting on the cause of the " meeting 
nighraf^ soul " in music, the seeming recognizance, etc., 
September ^^^•' *^^® wholc explanation of memory as in the 
27, 1804 nature of accord struck upon me ; accord pro- 
duces a phantom of memory, because memory is 
always in accord. 

Oct. 5, Philosophy to a few, religion with many, is 

the friend of poetry, as producing the two condi- 
tions of pleasure arising from poetry, namely, 
tranquillity and the attachment of the affections 
to generalizations. God, soul, Heaven, the 
Gospel miracles, etc., are a sort of 'poetry com- 
pared with Lombard Street and Change Alley 
speculations. 



A SERIOUS In company, indeed, with all except a very 
KANDUM chosen few, never dissent from any one as to the 
laturdT' ^^^^6*'*^* of another, especially in your own sup- 
Oct.5, posed department, but content yourself with 
praising in your turn ; the really good praises of 
the unworthy are felt by a good man and man 

m 



ANIMA POET^ 

of genius as detractions from the worthy, and 
robberies — so the flashy moderns seem to rob 
the ancients of the honors due to them, and 
Bacon and Harrington are not read because 
Hume and Condillac are. This is an evil ; but 
oppose it, if at all, in books in which you can 
evolve the whole of your reasons and feeling, 
not in conversation when it will be inevitably 
attributed to envy. Besides, they who praise the 
unworthy must be the injudicious ; and the eu- 
logies of critics without taste or judgment are 
the natural pay of authors without feeling or 
genius — and why rob them? Sint unicuique 
sua prmmia. Coleridge ! Coleridge ! will you 
never learn to appropriate your conversation to 
your company ! Is it not desecration, indelicacy, 
and a proof of great weakness and even vanity 
to talk to, etc., etc., as if you [were talking to] 
Wordsworth or Sir G. Beaumont? 

O young man, who has seen, felt, and known " cast 
the truth, to whom reality is a phantom, and 
virtue and mind the sole actual and permanent 
being, do not degrade the truth in thee by dis- 
puting. Avoid it ! do not by any persuasion be 
tempted to it ! Surely not by vanity or the Oct. li, 
weakness of the pleasure of communicating thy LeekVs^' 
thoughts and awaking sympathy, but not even by midnight 
the always mixed hope of producing conviction. 
This is not the mode, this is not the time, not 
the place. [Truth will be better served] by 
modestly and most truly saying, "Your argu- 
ments are all consequent, if the foundation be 
admitted. I do not admit the foundation. But 
this will be a business for moments of thought, 
67 



NOT YOUR 

PEARLS 

BEFORE 



ANIMA POETiE 

for a Sabbatli-day of your existence. Then, per- 
haps, a voice from within will say to you better, 
because [in a manner] more adapted to you, all 
I can say. But if I felt this to he that day or 
that moment, a sacred sympathy would at once 
compel and inspire me to the task of uttering 
the very truth. Till then I am right willing to 
bear the character of a mystic, a visionary, or 
self-important juggler, who nods his head and 
says, ' I could if I would.' But I cannot, I may 
not, bear the reproach of profaning the truth 
which is my life in moments when all passions 
heterogeneous to it are eclipsing it to the ex- 
clusion of its dimmest ray. I might lose my 
tranquillity, and in acquiring the passion of 
proselytism lose the sense of conviction. I might 
become positive ! Now I am certain ! I might 
have the heat and fermentation, now I have the 
warmth of life." 

THE Each man having a spark (to use the old 

metaphor) of the Divinity, yet a whole fire-grate 
of humanity, — each, therefore, will legislate for 
INFINITE the whole, and spite of the De gustihus non est 
1804 ' disputandum, even in trifles ; and, till corrected 
Syracuse' ^J experience, at least, in this endless struggle of 
presumption, really occasioned by the ever-work- 
ing spark of the Universal, in the disaj)point- 
ments and baffled attempts of each, all are dis- 
posed to [admit] the jus extrinsecum of Spinoza, 
and recognize that reason as the highest which 
may not be understood as the best, but of which 
the concrete possession is felt to be the strongest. 
Then come society, habit, education, misery, in- 
trigue, oppression, then revolution, and the circle 
68 



YEARNING 
OF THE 
FINITE 
FOR THE 



ANIMA POET^ 

begins anew. Each man will universalize his 
notions, and, yet, each is variously finite. To 
reconcile, therefore, is truly the work of the in- 
sjiired! This is the true Atonement — that is, to 
reconcile the struggles of the infinitely various 
finite with the permanent. 

Do not be too much discouraged if any virtue a mea- 
should be mixed, in your consciousness, with self-'^ 
affectation and imperfect sincerity, and some ^^fkoof 
vanity. Disapprove of this, and continue the 
practice of the good feeling, even though mixed, 
and it will gradually purify itself. Prohatuni 
est. Disapprove, be ashamed of the thought, of 
its always continuing thus, but do not harshly 
quarrel with your present self, for all virtue sub- 
sists in and by pleasure.* S. T. C. Sunday 
evening, October 14, 1804. 

But a great deal of this is constitutional. 
That constitution which predisposes to certain 
virtues, the Awpoi/ 6ewv, has this re/^evos Nc/xeo-ew? 
in it. It is the dregs of sympathy, and while 
we are weak and dependent on each other, and 
each is forced to think often for himself, sym- 
pathy will have its dregs, and the strongest, who 
have least of these, have the dregs of other vir- 
tues to strain off. 

All the objections to the opera are equally the 
applicable to tragedy and comedy without music, ^^^^^ 
and all proceed on the false principle that 
theatrical representations are copies of nature, 
whereas they are imitations. 

When you are harassed, disquieted, and have 
69 



ANIMA POET^ 



A SALVE 
FOR 

WOUNDED 
VANITY 



little dreams of resentment, and mock triumphs 
in consequence of the clearest perceptions of 
unkind treatment and strange misconceptions 
and illogicalities, palpably from bad passion, in 
any person connected with you, suspect a sym- 
pathy in yourself with some of these bad pas- 
sions — vanity, for instance. Though a sense of 
wounded justice is possible, nay, probably forms 
a part of your imeasy feelings, yet this of itself 
would yield, at the first moment of reflection, to 
pity for the wretched state of a man too untran- 
quil and perpetually selfish to love anything for 
itself or without some end of vanity or ambi- 
tion — who detests all poetry, tosses about in 
the impotence of desires disproportionate to his 
powers, and whose whole history of his whole 
life is a tale of disappointment in circumstances 
where the hope and pretension was always un- 
wise, often presumptuous and insolent. Surely 
an intuition of this restless and no-end-having 
mood of mind would at once fill a hearer having 
no sympathy with these passions with tender 
melancholy, virtuously mixed with grateful un- 
pharisaic self-complacency. But a patient al- 
most, but not quite, recovered from madness, 
yet on its confines, finds in the notions of mad- 
ness that which irritates and haunts and makes 
unhappy. 



OFFICIAL 
DISTRUST 

Malta, 
Friday, 
Nov. 23, 
1804 



One of the heart-depressing habits and temp- 
tations of men in power, as governors, etc., is to 
make instruments of their fellow-creatures, and 
the moment they find a man of honor and tal- 
ents, instead of loving and esteeming him, they 
wish to iise him. Hence that self-betraying side- 
70 



ANIMA POET^ 

and-down look of cunning ; and they justify and 
inveterate the habit by believing that every in- 
dividual who approaches has selfish designs on 
them. 

Days and weeks and months j)ass on, and now foe the 
a year — and the sea, the sea, and the breeze in ab- 
have their influence on me, and [so, too, has 'the ^^n<^^" 
association with] good and sensible men. I feel 
a pleasure upon me, and I am, to the outward 
view, cheerful, and have myself no distinct con- 
sciousness of the contrary, for I use my facul- 
ties, not, indeed, at once, but freely. But, oh ! 
I am never happy, never deeply gladdened. I 
know not — I have forgotten — what the joy is 
of which the heart is full, as of a deep and quiet 
fountain overflowing insensibly, or the gladness 
of joy when the fountain overflows ebullient. 

The most common aj)pearance in wintry wea- 
ther is that of the sun under a sharp, defined 
level line of a stormy cloud, that stretches one 
third or one half round the circle of the horizon, 
thrice the height of the space that intervenes 
between it and the horizon, which last is about 
half again as broad as the sun. [At length] 
out comes the sim, a mass of brassy light, him- 
self lost and diffused in his [own] strong splen- 
dor. Compare this with the beautiful summer 
set of colors without cloud. 

Even in the most tranquil dreams, one is 

much less a mere spectator [than in reveries or 

day-dreams]. One seems always about to do, 

[to be] suffering, or thinking, or talking. I do 

71 



ANIMA POET^ 

not recollect [in dreams] that state of feeling, so 
common when awake, of thinking on one subject 
and looking at another ; or [of looking] at a 
whole prospect, till at last, perhaps, or by inter- 
vals, at least, you only look passively at the 
prospect. 

MULTUM At Dresden there is a cherry-stone engraved 
IN PARvo ^.^j^ eighty-five portraits. Christ and the 
Twelve Apostles form one group, the table and 
supper all drawn by the letters of the text — at 
once portraits and language. This is a universal 
particular language — Roman Catholic language 
with a vengeance. 

The beautifully white sails of the Mediterra- 
nean, so carefully, when in port, put up into clean 
bags; and the interesting circumstance of the 
Speronara's sailing without a compass — by an 
obscure sense of time. 

THROUGH So far from deeming it, in a religious point 
FAITH ^^ of view, criminal to spread doubts of God, im- 
mortality, and virtue (that 3=1) in the minds 
of individuals, I seem to see in it a duty — lest 
men by taking the loords for granted never attain 
the feeling of the true faith. They only forbear, 
that is, even to suspect that the idea is errone- 
ous or the communicators deceivers, but do not 
believe the idea itself. Whereas to douht has 
more of faith, nay even to disbelieve, than that 
blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings 
which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meet- 
ing-trotters. 

72 



ANIMA POET^ 



The Holy Ghost, say the harmonists, left an apol- 
all the solecisms, Hebraisms, and low Judaic ctrTiT 
prejudices as evidences of the credibility of the 
Apostles. So, too, the Theopneusty left Cottle 
his Bristolisms, not to take away the credit from 
him and give it to the Muses. 



FOR THE 
SOOTHER 
S" IN AB- 



His fine mind met vice and vicious thoughts 
by accident only, as a poet running through i 
terminations in the heat of composing a rhyme ^^^^^ " 
poem on the purest and best subjects, startles 
and half vexedly turns away from a foul or im- 
pure word. 

The gracious promises and sweetnesses and 
aids of religion are alarming and distressful to a 
trifling, light, fluttering gay child of fashion and 
vanity, as its threats and reproaches and warn- 
ings, — as a little bird which fears as much 
when you come to give it food as when you come 
with a desire to kill or imprison it. 

That is a striking legend of Caracciolo and 
his floating corse, that came to ask the Kino- of 
Naples' pardon. 

Final causes answer to why ? not to how ? and 
whoever supposed that they did ? 

O those crinkled, ever-varying circles which 
the moonlight makes in the not calm, yet not 
wavy sea ! Quarantine, Malta, Saturday, Nov. 
10, 1804. 

Hard to express that sense of the analogy or 
73 



ANIMA POETiE 

THE CREA- likeness of a thing which enables a symbol to 
POWER OF represent it so that we think of the thing itself, 
JniT °^ yet knowing that the thing is not present to us. 
IMAGES Surely on this universal fact of words and images 
depends, by more or less mediations, the imita- 
tion, instead of the copy which is illustrated, 
in very nature Shaksperianized — that Proteus 
essence that could assume the very form, but 
yet known and felt not to be the thing by 
that difference of the substance which made every 
atom of the form another thing, that likeness not 
identity — an exact web, every line of direction 
miraculously the same, but the one worsted, the 
other silk. 



SHAK- 
SPERE 
AND 



Eival editors have recourse to necromancy to 
know from Shakspere himseK who of them is 
MALONE ^i^e fittest to edit and illustrate him. Describe 
the meeting, the ceremonies of conjuration, the 
appearance of the spirit, the effect on the rival 
invokers. When they have resumed courage, 
the arbiter appointed by them asks the question. 
They listen, — Malone leaps up while the rest 
lay their heads at the same instant that the 
arbiter reechoes the words of the spirit, "Let 
Malone ! " The spirit shudders, then exclaims 
in the dread and angry utterance of the dead, 
" No ! no ! Let me alone, I said, inexorable 
boobies ! " 

O that eternal bricker-up of Shakspere! 
Registers, memorandum-books — and that Bill, 
Jack, and Harry ; Tom, Walter, and Gregory ; 
Charles, Dick, and Jim, lived at that house, but 
that nothing more is known of them. But, oh ! 
the importance when half a dozen players'-bills 
74 



ANIMA POET^ 

can be made to stretch through half a hundred or 
more of pages, though there is not one word in 
them that by any force can be made either to 
ilkistrate the times or life or writings of Shak- - 
spere, or, indeed, of any time. And yet, no 
edition but this gentleman's name hurs upon it 
— hurglossa with a vengeance. Like the genitive 
plural of a Greek adjective, it is Malone, Malone, 
Malone, MaAwv, MaAwv, MaAwv. 

[Edmund Malone's Variorum edition of 
Shakspere was published in 1790.] 

It is a remark that I have made many times, of the 
and many times, I guess, shall repeat, that women nesJof 
are infinitely fonder of clinging to and beating December 
about, hanging upon and keeping up, and reluc- n. 1804 
tantly letting fall any doleful or painful or un- 
pleasant subject, than men of the same class 
and rank. 

A young man newly arrived in the West ne quid 
Indies, who happened to be sitting next to a 
certain Captain Reignia, observed by way of 
introducing a conversation, "It is a very fine 
day, sir ! " " Yes, sir," was the abrupt reply, 
" and be damned to it ; it is never otherwise in 
this damned rascally climate." 

I addressed a butterfly on a pea-blossom thus : we ask 
" Beautifvd Psyche, soul of a blossom, that art whence, 
visiting and hovering o'er thy former friends ^^^ what 
whom thou hast left ! " Had I forgot the cater- whither 
piUar? or did I dream like a mad metaphysician 
that the caterpillar's hunger for plants was self- 
75 



ANIMA POET^ 

love, recollection, and a lust that in its next state 
refined itseK into love ? Dec. 12, 1804. 

ANALOGY Different means to tlie same end seem to con- 
stitute analogy. Seeing and touching are anal- 
ogous senses with respect to magnitude, figure, 
etc. ; they would, and to a certain extent do, 
supply each other's place. The air-vessels of 
fish and of insects are analogous to lungs — the 
end the same, however different the means. No 
one would say, " Lungs are analogous to lungs," 
and it seems to me either inaccurate or involving 
some true conception obscurely, when we speak 
of planets by analogy of ours — for here, know- 
ing nothing but likeness, we presume the differ- 
ence from the remoteness and difficulty, in the 
vulgar apprehension, of considering those pin- 
points as worlds. So, likewise, instead of the 
phrase " analogy of the past," applied to histori- 
cal reasoning, nine times out of ten I should say, 
" by the example of the past." This may appear 
verbal trifling, but '-'■ animadverte quam sit ab 
improprietate verbomm pronum hominibus pro- 
labi in errores circa res.'" In short, analogy 
always implies a difference in kind and not 
merely in degree. There is an analogy between 
dimness and numbness, and a certain state of the 
sense of hearing correspondent to these, which 
produces confusion with magnification, for which 
we have no name. But between light green and 
dark green, between a mole and a lynceus, there 
is a gradation, no analogy. 

coROL- Between beasts and men, when the same 

actions are performed by both, are the means 
analogous or different only in degree ? That is 
76 



LAKY 



ANIMA POETiE 

the question! Tlie sameness of tlie end and 
the equal fitness of the means prove no identity 
of means. I can only read, but understand no 
arithmetic. Yet, by Napier's tables or the 
Housekeepers' Almanack, I may even arrive at 
the conclusion quicker than a tolerably expert 
mathematician. Yet, stHl, reading and reckon- 
ing are utterly different things. 

In Reimarus on Tlie Instincts of Animals, ^non^. 
lorn Wedgwood's ground-principle of the influx ™'and 
ot memory on perception is fully and beautifuUv ^^^^'^^^^ 
detailed. "^ 

["Observations Moral and Philosophical on 
the Instinct of Animals, their Industry and their 
Manners," by Herman Samuel Reimarus, was 
published in 1770. See Biographia Literaria, 
chapter vi., and 7iote, by Mrs. H. N. Colerido-e . 
m the Appendix, Coleridge's Works, Harper''& 
Brothers, iii. 225, 717.J 

It is often said that books are companions, hixc x..a 
Ihey are so, dear, very dear companions. But naliT' 
1 often, when I read a book that delights me on 
the whole, feel a pang that the author is not 
present, that I cannot object to him this and that 
express my sympathy and gratitude for this part' 
and mention some facts that self-evidently overset 
a second, start a doubt about a third, or confirm 
and carry [on] a fourth thought. At times I 
become restless, for my nature is very social. 

"Well" (says Lady Ball), "the Catholic corkup- 
religion is better than none." Whv tn 1.a ^'ooptimi 
sure. It IS caUed a religion, but the question is, 

77 



ANIMA POET^ 

Is it a religion ? Sugar of lead ! — better than 
no sugar ! Put oil of vitriol into my salad — - 
well, better than no oil at all ! Or a fellow vends 
a poison under the name of James' powders — 
well, we must get the best we can — better that 
than none ! So did not our noble ancestors 
reason or feel, or we should now be slaves and 
even as the Sicilians are at this day, or worse, 
for even they have been made less foolish, in 
spite of themselves, by others' wisdom. 

KEiMAKus I have read with wonder and delight that 
"in- passage of Reimarus in which he speaks of the 

^l^^^T^ immense multitude of plants, and the curious, 

OF ANI- 1 ' ' 

MALs" regular choice of different herbivorous animals 
with respect to them, and the following pages 
in which he treats of the pairing of insects and 
the equally wonderful processes of egg-laying 
and so forth. All in motion ! the sea-fish to the 
shores and rivers — the land crab to the sea- 
shore! I would fain describe all the creation 
thus agitated by the one or other of the three 
instincts, — self-preservation, childing, and child- 
preservation. Set this by Darwin's theory of the 
maternal instinct — O mercy ! the blindness of 
the man ! and it is imagination, forsooth ! that 
misled him — too much poetry in his philoso- 
phy ! this abject deadness of all that sense of 
the obscure and indefinite, this superstitious 
fetich-worship of lazy or fascinated fancy ! O 
this, indeed, deserves to be dwelt on. 

Think of all this as an absolute revelation, a 
real presence of Deity, and compare it with his- 
torical traditionary religion. There are two reve- 

78 



ANIMA POET^ 

lations, — the material and the moral, — and the 
former Is not to be seen but by the latter. As 
St. Paul has so well observed : " By worldly wis- 
dom no man ever arrived at God ; " but having 
seen Him by the moral sense, then we under- 
stand the outward world. Even as with books, 
no book of itself teaches a language in the first 
instance ; but having by sympathy of soul learnt 
it, we then understand the book — that is, the 
Deus minor in His work. 

The hirschh'dfer (stag-beetle) in its worm 
state makes its bed-chamber, prior to its meta- 
morphosis, half as long as itself. Why ? There 
was a stiff horn turned under its belly, which in 
the fly state must project and harden, and this 
required exactly that length. 

The sea-snail creeps out of its house, which, 
thus hollowed, lifts him aloft, and is his boat 
and cork jacket ; the Nautilus, additionally, 
spreads a thin skin as a sail. 

All creatures obey the great game-laws of 
Nature, and fish with nets of such meshes as per- 
mit many to escape, and preclude the taking of 
many. So two races are saved, the one by tak- 
ing part, and the other by part not being taken. 

Wonderful, perplexing divisibility of life ! It entomo- 
is related by D. Unzer, an authority wholly to be verIus 
relied on, that an ohrwurm (earwig) cut in half ontology 
ate its own hinder part ! Will it be the reverse 
with Great Britain and America ? The head of 
the rattlesnake severed from the body bit it and 
79 



ANIMA POET^ 

squirted out its poison, as its related by Beverly 
in his History of Virginia. Lyonnet, in liis In- 
sect. Theol., tells us that he tore a wasp in half, 
and three days after the fore half bit whatever 
was presented to it of its former food, and the 
hind half darted out its sting at being touched. 
Stranger still, a turtle has been known to live 
six months with his head off, and to wander 
about, yea, six hours after its heart and intestines 
(all but the lungs) were taken out ! How shall 
we think of this compatibility with the monad 
soul? If I say, What has spirit to do with 
space ? what odd dreams it would suggest ! — or 
is every animal a republic in se f or is there one 
Breeze of Life, " at once the soul of each, and 
God of all " ? Is it not strictly analogous to 
generation, and no more contrary to unity than 
it ? But IT ? Ay ! there 's the twist in the 
logic. Is not the reproduction of the lizard a 
complete generation ? O, it is easy to dream — 
and, surely, better — of these things than of a 
^20,000 prize in the lottery, or of a place at 
Court. Dec. 13, 1804. 

FOR THE To trace the if not absolute birth, yet the 
IN AB^"*^^ growth and endurancy, of language from the 
SENCE " mother talking to the child at her breast — O 

what a subject for some happy moment of deep 

feeling and strong imagination ! 

Of the Quintetta in the Syracuse opera and 
the pleasure of the voices, — one and not one ; 
they leave, seek, pursue, oppose, fight with, 
strengthen, annihilate each other ; awake, en- 
liven, soothe, flatter, and embrace each other 
80 



ANIMA POET^ 

again, till at length they die away in one tone. 
There is no sweeter image of wayward yet fond 
lovers, of seeking and finding, of the love-quar- 
rel and the making-up, of the losing and the 
yearning regret, of the doubtful, the complete 
recognition, and of the total melting union. 
Words are not interpreters, but fellow-combat- 
ants. 

Title for a Medical Romance : — 

The adventures, rivalry, warfare, and final 
union and partnership of Dr. Hocus and Dr. 
Pocus. 

Idly talk they who speak of poets as mere 
indulgers of fancy, imagination, superstition, 
etc. They are the bridlers by delight, the purifi- 
ers ; they that combine all these with reason and 
order — the true protoplasts — Gods of Love 
who tame the chaos. 

To deduce instincts from obscure recollections 
of a preexisting state — I have often thought of 
it. " Ey ! " I have said, when I have seen cer- 
tain tempers and actions in Hartley, " that is I 
in my future state." So I think, oftentimes, 
that my children are my soul; that multitude 
and division are not [O mystery !] necessarily 
subversive of unity. I am sure that two very 
different meanings, if not more, lurk in the word 
One. 

The drollest explanation of instinct is that 
of Mylius, who attributes every act to pain, and 
all the wonderful webs and envelopes of spiders, 
81 



ANIMA POETiE 

caterpillars, etc., absolutely to fits of colic or 
paroxysms of dry belly-ache ! 

This tarantula-dance of repetitions and verti- 
ginous argumentation in circulo, begun in im- 
posture and self -consummated in madness ! 

While the whole planet (quoad its Lord or, at 
least, Lord-Lieutenancy) is in stir and bustle, 
why should not I keep in time with the tune, 
and, like old Diogenes, roll my tub about ? 

\y I cannot too often remember that to be deeply 
interested and to be highly satisfied are not 
always commensurate. Apply this to the affect- 
ing and yet unnatural passages of the Stranger 
or of John Bull, and to the finest passages in 
Shakspere, such as the death of Cleopatra or 
Hamlet. 

A SUN-DOG Saw the limb of a rainbow, footing itself on 
1^04 ^^' tli6 sea at a small apparent distance from the 
shore, a thing of itself — no substrate cloud or 
even mist visible — but the distance glimmered 
through it as through a thin semi-transparent 
hoop. 



THE To be and to act, two in intellect (that mother 

the^cir'- of orderly multitude, and half sister of Wisdom 

PYKAMiD ^^^ Madness), but one in essence = to rest, and 

to move = D and a O • and out of the infinite 

combinations of these, from the more and the 

less, now of one, now of the other, all pleasing 

figures, and the sources of all pleasure arise. 

But the pyramid, that base of steadfastness that 

82 



ANIMA POET^ 

rises, yet never deserts itself nor can, approaches 
to the O- Sunday. Midnight. Malta. De- 
cember 16, 1804. 

I can make out no other affinity [in the pyra- the 
mid] to the circle but by taking its evanescence fjAKx''* 
as the central point, and so, having thus gained 
a melting of the radii in the circumference [by 
proceeding to], looh it into the object. Extrava- 
gance ! Why ? Does not every one do this in 
looking at any conspicuous three stars together? 
does not every one see by the inner vision a tri- 
angle ? However, this is in art ; but the prototype 
in nature is, indeed, loveliness. In Nature there 
are no straight lines, or [such straight lines as 
there are] have the soul of curves, from activity 
and positive rapid energy. Or, whether the line 
seem curve or straight, yet here^ in nature, is 
motion, — motion in its most significant form. 
It is motion in that form which has been chosen 
to express motion in general, hieroglyphical from 
preeminence [and by this very preeminence, in 
the particular instance, made significant of mo- 
tion in its totality]. Hence, though it chance 
that a line in nature should be perfectly straight, 
there is no need here of any curve whose effect 
is that of embleming motion and counteracting 
actual solidity by that emblem. For here the 
line [in contradistinction to the line in art] is 
actual motion, and therefore a balancing Figurite 
of rest and solidity. But I will study the wood- 
fire this evening in the Palace. 

I see now that the eye refuses to decide 
whether it be surface or convexity, for the 
83 



ANIMA POET^ 

Wednes- exquisite oneness of the flame makes even its 

11 o'clock, angles so different from the angles of tangible 
r> 1Q 

substances. Its exceeding oneness added to its 

very subsistence in motion is the very sotd 

of the loveliest curve — it does not need its 

body, as it were. Its sharpest point is, however, 

rounded, and, besides, it is cased within its own 

penumbra. 



FOR THE How beautiful a circumstance, the improve- 
iN AB- ment of the flower, from the root up to that 
Frfday crown of its life and labors, that bridal chamber 
morning, of its bcauty and its twofold love, the nuptial 
8 o'clock and the parental — the womb, the cradle, and 
the nursery of the garden ! 

Qulsque sui faher — a pretty simile this 
would make to a young lady producing beauty 
by moral feeling. 

Nature may be personified as the irokvix.y]ya.vo% 
ipydvr], an ever industrious Penelope, forever un- 
ravelling what she has woven, forever weaving 
what she has unravelled. 

THE MEDi- Oh, said I, as I looked at the blue, yellow- 
NEAN " green, and purple-green sea, with all its hollows 
and swells, and cut-glass surfaces, — oh, what an 
ocean of lovely forms ! And I was vexed, teased, 
that the sentence sounded like a play of words ! 
That it was not — the mind within me was strug- 
gling to express the marvellous distinctness and 
unconfounded personality of each of the million 
millions of forms, and yet the individual unity in 
which they subsisted. 

84 



ANIMA POET^E 

A brisk gale and the foam that peopled the 
alive sea, most interestingly combined with the 
number of white sea-gulls, that repeatedly it 
seemed as if the foam-spit had taken life and 
wing, and had flown up — the white precisely- 
same-color birds rose up so close by the ever- 
perishing white-water wave-head, that the eye 
was unable to detect the illusion which the mind 
delighted to indulge in. O that sky, that soft, 
blue, mighty arch resting on the mountain or 
solid sea-like plain — what an awf nl omneity in 
unity. I know no other perfect union of the 
sublime with the beautiful, so that they should 
be felt, that is, at the same minute, though by 
different faculties, and yet each faculty be pre- 
disposed, by itself, to receive the specific modi- 
fications from the other. To the eye it is an 
inverted goblet, the inside of a sapphire basin, 
perfect beauty in shape and color. To the mind, 
it is immensity ; but even the eye feels as if it 
were [able] to look through with [a] dim sense 
of the nonresistance — it is not exactly the 
feeling given to the organ by solid and limited 
things, [but] the eye feels that the limitation 
is in its own power, not in the object. But 
[hereafter] to pursue this in the manner of the 
old Hamburgh poet [Klopstock]. 

One travels along with the lines of a moun- 1 will 
tain.^ Years ago I wanted to make Wordsworth mine eyes 
sensible of this. How fine is Keswick vale ! ^° "^"^ 
Would I repose, my soul lies and is quiet upon 
the broad level vale. Would it act ? it darts up 
into the mountain-top like a kite, and like a 
chamois-goat runs along the ridge — or like a 
85 



ANIMA POET^ 

boy that makes a sport on the road of running 
along a wall or narrow fence ! 

FORM AND One of the most noticeable and fruitful facts 

FEELING . . ,.„ . 

in psychology is the modification of the same 
feeling by difference of form. The Heaven lifts 
up my soul, the sight of the ocean seems to 
widen it. We feel the same force at work, but 
the difference, whether in mind or body, that we 
should feel in actual travelling horizontally or in 
direct ascent, that we feel in fancy. For what 
are our feelings of this kind but a motion 
imagined, [together] with the feelings that 
would accompany that motion, [but] less distin- 
guished, more blended, more rapid, more con- 
fused, and, thereby, coadunated ? Just as white 
is the very emblem of one in being the confusion 
of all. 



VERBUM Mem. — Not to hastily abandon and kick 

SAPIKNTI- , c 1 1 . 

BUS away the means after the end is, or seems to be, 

accomplished. So have I, in blowing out the 
paper or match with which I have lit a candle, 
blown out the candle at the same instant. 



THE CON- How opposite to nature and the fact to talk 

TINUITY 

OF SENSA- of the " one moment " of Hume, of our whole be- 
ing an aggregate of successive single sensations ! 
Who ever felt a single sensation ? Is not every 
one at the same moment conscious that there 
coexists a thousand others, a darker shade, or 
less light, even as when I fix my attention on a 
white house, or a gray, bare hill, or rather long 
ridge that runs out of sight each way (how often 
I want the German unubersehhar /) [untranslat- 
86 



ANIMA POETiE 

able] — the pretended sight-sensation, is it any- 
thing more than the light-point in every picture 
either of nature or of a good painter ? and, again, 
subordinately, in every component part of the 
picture ? And what is a moment ? Succession 
with interspace ? Absurdity ! It is evidently 
only the licht-punct in the indivisible undivided 
duration. 

^ See yonder rainbow strangely preserving its 
form on broken clouds, with here a bit out, here 
a bit in, yet still a rambow — even as you might 
place bits of colored ribbon at distances, so as to 
preserve the form of a bow to the mind. Dec. 
25, 1804. 

There are two sorts of talkative fellows whom his con- 
it would be injurious to confound, and I, S. T. tion, a 
Coleridge, am the latter. The first sort is of ^p^Js, 
those who use five hundred words more than ^^^ ^^^ 

, . WORDS 

needs to express an idea — that is not my case. 
Few men, I will be bold to say, put more mean- 
ing into their words than I, or choose them more 
deliberately and discriminately. The second sort 
is of those who use five hundred more ideas, 
images, reasons, etc., than there is any need of 
to arrive at their object, till the only object ar- 
rived at is that the mind's eye of the bystander is 
dazzled with colors succeeding so rapidly as to 
leave one vague impression that there has been a 
great blaze of colors all about something. Now 
this is my case, and a grievous fault it is. My 
illustrations swallow up my thesis. I feel too in- 
tensely the omnipresence of all in each, platon- 
ically speaking ; or, psychologically, my brain- 
87 



ANIMA POET^ 

fibres, or the spiritual light wliieh abides in the 
brain-marrow, as visible light appears to do in 
sundry rotten mackerel and other smashy mat- 
ters, is of too general an affinity with all things, 
and though it pei^ceives the difference of things, 
yet is eternally pursuing the likenesses, or, 
rather, that which is common [between them]. 
Bring me two things that seem the very same, 
and then I am quick enough [not only] to show 
the difference, even to hair-splitting, but to go on 
from circle to circle till I break against the shore 
of my hearers' patience, or have my concentricals 
dashed to nothing by a snore. That is my ordi- 
nary mishap. At Malta, liowever, no one can 
charge me with one or the other. I have earned 
the general character of being a quiet well-mean- 
ing man, rather dull indeed ! and who would 
have thought that he had been a poet! " O, 
a very wretched poetaster, ma'am ! As to the 
reviews, 'tis well known he half ruined himself 
in paying cleverer fellows than himself to write 
them," etc. 

THE EM- How far might one imagine all the theory of 
SOUL association out of a system of growth, by apply- 

ing to the brain and soul what we know of an 
embryo ? One tiny particle combines with an- 
other its like, and, so, lengthens and thickens, 
and this is, at once, memory and increasing vivid- 
ness of impression. One might make a very 
amusing allegory of an embryo soul up to birth ! 
Try ! it is promising ! You have not above three 
hundred volmnes to write before you come to it, 
and as you write, perhaps, a volume once in ten 
years, you have ample time. 
88 



ANIMA POET^ 

My dear fellow ! never be ashamed of schem- 
ing — you can't think of living less than 4000 
years, and that would nearly suffice for your 
present schemes. To be sure, if they go on in 
the same ratio to the performance, then a small 
difficulty arises ; but never mind ! look at the 
bright side always and die in a dream ! Oh ! 

The evil effect of a new hypothesis or even of of a new 
a new nomenclature is, that many minds which sis 
had familiarized themselves to the old one, and 
were riding on the road of discovery accustomed 
to their horse, if put on a new animal, lose time 
in learning how to sit him ; while the others, 
looking too steadfastly at a few facts which the 
jeweller Hypothesis had set in a perfectly beau- 
tifid whole, forget to dig for more, though in- 
habitants of a Golconda. However, it has its 
advantages too, and these have been ably pointed 
out. It excites contradiction, and Is thence a 
stimulus to new experiments to sii])port, and 
to a more severe repetition of these experiments 
and of other new ones to confute [arguments 
pro and con]. And, besides, one must alloy 
severe truth with a little fancy, in order to mint 
it into common coin. 

In the preface of my metaphysical works, I his m- 
should say, " Once for all, read Kant, Fichte, ness^to 
etc., and then you will trace, or, if you are on merman 

' *' ' ' J PHILOSO- 

the hunt, track me." Why, then, not acknow- phy 
ledge your obligations step by step ? Because I 
could not do so in a multitude of glaring resem- 
blances without a lie, for they had been mine, 
formed and full-formed, before I had ever heard 
89 



ANIMA POET^ 

of these writers; because to have fixed on the 
particular instances in which I have really been 
indebted to these writers woidd have been hard, 
if possible, to me who read for truth and self- 
satisfaction, and not to make a book, and who 
always rejoiced and was jubilant when I found my 
own ideas well expressed by others ; and, lastly, 
let me say, because (I am proud, perhaps, but) 
I seem to know that much of the matter remains 
my own, and that the soul is mine. I fear not 
him for a critic who can confound a fellow- 
thinker with a compiler. 

THE META- Good licavcns ! that there should be anything 
at all, and not nothing. Ask the blunted faculty 
that pretends to reason, and, if indeed he have 
felt and reasoned, he must feel that something 
is to be sought after out of the vulgar track of 
Change-Alley speculation. 

If my researches are shadowy, what, in the 
name of reason, are you ? or do you resign all 
pretence to reason, and consider yourself — nay, 
even that in a contradiction — as a passive O 
among Nothings ? 



PHYSICIAN 
AT BAY 



ENDS 



MEANS TO How flat and commonplace ! O that it were 
in my heart, nerves, and muscles ! O that it 
were the prudential soul of all I love, of all who 
deserve to be loved, in every proposed action to 
ask yourself. To what end is this ? and how is 
this the means ? and not the means to something 
else foreign to or abhorrent from my purpose ? 
Distinct means to distinct ends ! With friends 
and beloved ones follow the heart. Better be 
deceived twenty times than suspect one twentieth 
90 



ANIMA POET^ 

of once ; but with strangers, or enemies, or in a 
quarrel, whether in the world's squabbles, as Dr 
Stoddarts and Dr. Sorel in the Admiralty 
Court at Malta; or in moral businesses, as 
mme with Southey or Lloyd (O pardon me 
dear and honored Southey, that I put such a 
name by the side of yours . . . ) -m all those 
cases, write your letter, disburthen yourself, and 
when you have done it —even as when you have 
pared, shced, vinegared, oiled, peppered and 
salted your plate of cucumber, you are directed 
to smell It, and then throw it out of the window 
— so, dear friend, vinegar, pepper, and salt your 
letter — your cucumber argument, that is, cool 
reasonmg previously sauced with passion and 
sharpness -then read it, eat it, drink it, smell 
It, with eyes and ears (a small catachresis but 
never mmd), and then throw it into the fire — 
unless you can put down in three or four sen 
tences (I cannot allow more than one side of a 
sheet of paper) the distinct end for which vou 
conceive this letter (or whatever it be) to be 
th^ distinct means! How trivial! Would to 
Orod It were only habitual! O what is sadder 
than that the cramhe his cocta of the understand- 
1^ should be and remain a foreign dish to the 
efficient wdl-- that the best and loftiest precepts 
of wisdom should be trivial, and the worst and 
lowest modes of folly habitual. 

seldom harshly, to chide those conceits of words ^<^^^^"s 
which are analogous to sudden fleeting affinities 

jom and off agam, and rejoin your partner that 
91 



/ 



ANIMA POET^ 

leads down with you the dance, in spite of these 
occasional off-starts — for they, tpo, not merely 
conform to, but are of and in and help to form, 
the delicious harmony. Shakspere is not a thou- 
sandth part so faulty as the 000 believe him. 
" Thus him that over-rul'd I over-sway'd," etc., 
etc. I noticed this to that bubbling ice-spring 
of cold-hearted, mad-headed fanaticism, the late 
Dr. Geddes, in the " Heri vidi fragilem frangi^ 
hodie mortalem mori." 

[Dr. Alexander Geddes, 1737-1802, was, 
inter alia, author of a revised translation of 
the Scriptures.] 

THE How often I have occasion to notice with pure 

blue'sea delight the depth of the exceeding blueness of * 
the Mediterranean from my window! It is 
often, indeed, purple ; but I am speaking of its 
blueness — a perfect blue, so very pure an one. 
The sea is like a night-sky; and but for its 
planities, it were as if the night-sky were a 
thing that turned round and lay in the daytime 
under the paler heaven. And it is on this ex- 
panse that the vessels have the fine white daz- 
zling cotton sails. 

THE Centuries before their mortal incarnation, Jove 

thTidea ^^^ wont to manifest to the gods the several 
creations as they emerged from the divine ideal. 
Now it was reported in heaven that an unusu- 
ally fair creation of a woman was emerging, and 
Venus, fearful that her son should become en- 
amored as of yore with Psyche (what time he 
wandered alone, his bow unslung, and using his 
darts only to cut out her name on rocks and 
92 



ANIMA POET^ 

trees, or, at best, to shoot humming-birds and 
birds of Paradise to make feather chaplets for 
her hair ; and the world, meanwhile, grown love- 
less, — hardened into the Iron Age^, entreats 
Jove to secrete this form [of perilous beauty]. 
But Cupid, who had heard the report, and fondly 
expected a re-manifestation of Psyche, hid him- 
self in the hollow of the sacred oak beneath 
which the Father of Gods had withdrawn, as to 
an unapproachable adytum, and beheld the Idea 
emerging in its J^irst Glory. Forthwith the 
wanton was struck blind by the splendor ere 
yet the blaze had defined itself with form, and 
now his arrows strike but vaguely. 

I have somewhere read, or I have dreamt, the con 
a wild tale of Ceres' loss of Proserpine, and of cekes 
her final recovery of her daughter by means of 
Christ when He descended into hell, at which 
time she met Him and abjured all worship for 
the future. 

It were a quaint mythological conceit to feign 
that the gods of Greece and Rome were some 
of the hest of the fallen spirits, and that of their 
number Apollo, Mars, and the Muses were con- 
verted to Christianity, and became different 
saints. 

The ribbed flame — its snatches of impatience, as the 
that half seem, and only seem that half, to baffle fly"'^^ 
its upward rush ; the eternal unity of individ- upward 
ualities whose essence is in their distinguishable- 
ness, even as thought and J'ancies in the mind ; the 
points of so many cherubic swords snatched back, 
but never discouraged, still foulitaining upwards ; 
93 



ANIMA POET^ 

— flames self -snatched up heavenward, if earth 
supply the fuel, heaven the dry light air — them- 
selves stiU making the current that wiU fan and 
spread them — yet all their force in vain, if of 
itself — and light dry air, heaped fuel, fanning 
breeze as idle, if no inward spark lurks there, 
or lurks unkindled. Such a spark, O man ! is 
thy Free Will — the star whose beams are Vir- 
tue. 

94 



CHAPTER IV. 

1805. 

" Alone, alone, all, all alone, 
Alone on a wide, wide sea ! 
And never a saint took pity on 
My soul in agony." 

S. T. C. 

This evening there was the most perfect and the sense 
the brightest halo circling the roundest and tude^^^^' 
brightest moon I ever beheld. So bright was J^esday, 
the halo, so compact, so entire a circle, that 1805 
it gave the whole of its area, the moon itself 
included, the appearance of a solid opaque 
body, an enormous planet. It was as if this 
planet had a circular trough of some light- 
reflecting fluid for its rim (that is, the halo), and 
its centre (that is, the moon) a small circular 
basin of some fluid that still more copiously 
reflected, or that even emitted light ; and as if 
the interspatial area were somewhat equally sub- 
stantial, but sullen. Thence I have found occa- 
sion to meditate on the nature of the sense of 
magnitude and its absolute dependence on the 
idea of substance; the consequent difference 
between magnitude and spaciousness, the de- 
pendence of the idea on double-touch, and 
thence to evolve all our feelings and ideas of 
magnitude, magnitudinal sublimity, etc., from a 
scale of our own bodies. For why, if form con- 
stituted the sense, that is, if it were pure vision, 
as a perceptive sense abstracted from feeling in 
95 



ANIMA POETiE 

the organ of vision, — why do I seek for moun- 
tains, when in the flattest countries the clouds 
present so many and so much more romantic 
and spacious forms, and the coal-fire so many, 
so much more varied and lovely forms ? And 
whence arises the pleasure from musing on the 
latter? Do I not, more or less consciously, fancy 
myself a Lillij)utian, to whom these would be 
mountains, and so, by this factitious scale, make 
them mountains, my pleasure being consequently 
playful, a voluntary poem in hieroglyphics or 
picture-writing — '''• phmitoms of sublimity," 
which I continue to know to be pliantomsf 
And form itself, is not its main agency exerted 
in individualizing the thing, making it tins and 
that^ and thereby facilitating the shadowy mea- 
surement of it by the scale of my own body ? 

Yon long, not unvaried, ridge of hills, that 
runs out of sight each way, it is spacious, and 
the pleasure derivable from it is from its run- 
ning, its motion, its assimilation to action; and 
here the scale is taken from my life and soul, 
and not from my body. Space is the Hebrew 
name for God, and it is the most perfect image 
of soul, pure sord, being to us nothing but unre- 
sisted action. Whenever action is resisted, limi- 
tation begins — and limitation is the first constit- 
uent of body — the more omnipresent it is in a 
given space, the more that space is body or mat- 
ter — and thus all body necessarily presupposes 
soul, inasmuch as all resistance presupposes ac- 
tion. Magnitude, therefore, is the intimate blend- 
ing, the most perfect union, through its whole 
sphere, in every minutest part of it, of action and 
resistance to action. It is spaciousness in which 
96 



ANIMA POET^ 

space is filled up — that is, as we well say, trans- 
mitted by incorporate accession, not destroyed. 
In all limited things, that is, in all forms, it is at 
least fantastically stopped, and, thus, from the 
positive grasp to the mountain, from the moun- 
tain to the cloud, from the cloud to the blue depth 
of sky, which, as on the top of Etna, in a serene 
atmosphere, seems to go hehind the sun, all is 
graduation, that preludes division, indeed, but 
not distinction ; and he who endeavors to overturn 
a distinction by showing that there is no chasm, 
by the old sophism of the cumidus or the horse's 
tail, is still diseased with \X\^ formication} ^^ 
(what is the nosological name of it ? the hairs 
or dancing infinites of black specks seeming 
always to be before the eye), — the araneosis of 
corpuscular materialism. — S. T. C. 

The least things, how they evidence the supe- stray 
riority of English artisans ! Even the Maltese 
wafers, for instance, that stick to your mouth " 
and fingers almost so as to make it impossible to sence" 
get them off without squeezing them into a little 
pellet, and yet will not stick to the paper. 

Every one of tolerable education feels the imi- 
tability of Dr. Johnson's and other-such's style, 
the inimitability of Shakspere's, etc. Hence, I 

1 When instead of the general feeling of the life-blood in its 
equable individual motion, and the consequent wholeness of 
the one feeling of the skin, we feel as if a heap of ants were 
running over us, — the one corrupting into ten thousand, — so in 
araneosis, instead of the one view of the air, or blue sky, a 
thousand specks, etc., dance before the eye. The metaphor is 
as just as, of a metaphor, any one has a right to claim, but it is 
clumsily expressed. — S. T. C. 

97 



THOUGHTS 
FOR THE 

SOOTHER 
IN AB- 



ANIMA POET^ 

believe, arises the partiality of thousands for 
Johnson. They can imagine themselves doing 
the same. Vanity is at the bottom of it. The 
number of imitators proves this in some measure. 

Of the feelings of the English at the sight of 
a convoy from England. Man cannot be selfish 
— that part of me (my beloved) which is dis- 
tant, in space, excites the same feeling as the 
"ich"i distant from me in time. My friends 
are indeed my soul ! 

Jan. 22 I bad not moved from my seat, and wanted 

1805 |.jjg stick of sealing-wax, nearly a whole one, for 

another letter. I could not find it, it was not on 
the table — had it dropped on the ground? I 
searched and searched everywhere, my pockets, 
my fobs, impossible places — literally it had van- 
ished, and where was it ? It had stuck to my 
elhow, I having leaned upon it ere it had grown 
cold ! A curious accident, and in no way sim- 
ilar to that of the butcher and his steel in 
his mouth which he was seeking for. Mine was 
true accident. 

The maxims which govern the Courts of Ad- 
miralty, their " betwixt and between " of pos- 
itive law and the dictates of right reason, re- 
semble the halfway inter jus et cequitatem of 
Roman jurisprudence. It were worth while to 
examine the advantages of this as far as it is a 
real modification, its disadvantages as far as it 
appears ajumhle. 

1 I have the same anxiety for my friend now in England as 
for myself, that is to be, or may be, two months hence. 

98 



ANIMA POET^ 

/ Seeing a nice bed of glowing embers with one 
junk of firewood well placed, like the remains of 
an old edifice, and another, well-nigh mouldered 
one corresponding to it, I felt an impulse to put 
on three pieces of wood that exactly completed 
the perishable architecture, though it was eleven 
o'clock, though I was that instant going to bed, 
and there could be, in common ideas, no possible 
use in it. Hence I seem (for I write, not hav- 
ing yet gone to bed) to suspect that this disease 
of totalizing, of perfecting, may be the bottom 
impulse of many, many actions, in which it 
never is brought forward as an avowed or even 
agnized as a conscious motive. 

Mem. — To collect facts for a comparison be- 
tween a wood and a coal fii-e, as to sights and 
sounds and bodily feeling. 

I have read somewhere of a sailor who dreamt 
that an encounter with the enemy was about to 
take place, and that he should discover coward- 
ice during action. Accordingly he awakes his 
brother the Captain, and bids him prepare for an 
engagement. At daybreak a ship is discovered 
on the horizon, and the sailor, mindful of his 
dream, procures himself to be tied to a post. At 
the close of the day he is released unwouuded, but 
dead from fright. Apply this incident to Miss 
Edgeworth's Tales, and all similar attempts to 
cure faults by detailed forewarnings, which leave 
on the similarly faulty an impression of fatality 
that extinguishes hojse. 

What precedes to the voice follows to the eye, 
as 000.1 and 100. A, B, C —were they men, 
99 



ANIMA POET^ 

you would say that " C " went first, but being 
letters, tilings of voice and ear in their original, 
we say that " A " goes first. 

There are many men who, following, made 
1=1000, being placed at head, become useless 
cyphers, mere finery for form's sake. 

Feb. 1, Of the millions that use the pen, how many 

Friday, (<l^^ery) understand the story of this machine, 
Malta tjje action of the slit, eh? I confess, ridiculous 
as it must appear to those who do understand it, 
that I have not been able to answer the question 
off-hand to myself, having only this moment 
thought of it. 

Feb. 3, The gentlest form of Death, — a Sylphid 

^^^^ Death, — passed by, beheld a sleeping baby, be- 

came, Narcissus-like, enamored of its own self in 
the sweet counterfeit, seized it, and carried it off 
as a mirror close by the green Paradise; but 
the reviving air awakened the babe, and 't was 
death that died at the sudden loss. 



THE 

FRENCH 
I>ANGUAGE 
AND 

I'OETRY 



I cannot admit that any language can be unfit 
for poetry, or that there is any language in which 
a divinely inspired architect may not sustain the 
Feb. 4, lofty edifice of verse on its two pillars of sub- 
limity and pathos. Yet I have heard French- 
men, nay, even Englishmen, assert that of the 
German, which contains perhaps an hundred pas- 
sages equal to the — 

" Und ein Gottist, ein heiliger Wille lebt, 
Wie auch der menschliche wanke ; " 

and I have heard both German and Englishmen 
100 



ANIMA POET^ 

(and these, too, men of true feeling and genius, 
and so many of them that such comi)any of my 
betters makes me not ashamed to the havino- my- 
self been guilty of this injustice) assert that the 
French language is insusceptible of poetry in its 
higher and purer sense, — of poetry which excites 
emotion, not merely creates amusement ; which 
demands continuous admiration, not regular re- 
currence of conscious surprise, and the effect of 
which is love and joy. Unfortunately the man- 
ners, religion, and government of France, and the 
circumstances of its emergence from the poly- 
archy of feudal barony, have given a bad taste to 
the Parisians — so bad a one as doubtless to have 
, mildewed many an opening blossom. I cannot 
/ say that I know and can name any one French 
writer that can be placed among the greater 
poets, but when I read the Inscription over the 
Chartreuse — 

" C'est ici que la Mort et la Verity 

Elevent leurs flambeaux terribles ; 
C'est de cette demeure au monde inaccessible 
Que Ton passe ^FEtemit^ " — 

I seem to feel that If France had been for ages a 
Protestant nation, and a Milton had been born 
in It, the French language would not have pre- 
cluded the production of a " Paradise Lost," 
though it might, perhaps, that of a Hamlet or a 
Lear. 

On Friday night, 8th Feb., 1805, my feeling, the ab- 
In sleep, of exceeding great love for my Infant, 'el^ "^ 
seen by me In the dream ! — yet so as It might O." Friday 
be Sara, Derwent, or Berkley, and still It was an ^Ih. h, 
Individual babe and mine. ^^^^ 

101 



ANIMA POET^ 

" All look or likeness caught from earth, 

All accident of kin or birth, 

Had pass'd away. There seem'd no trace 

Of aught upon her brighten 'd face, 

Upraised beneath the rifted stone, 

Save of one spirit all her own ; 

She, she herself, and only she, 

Shone through her body visibly." 

Poetical Works, 1893, p. 172. 

This abstract self is, indeed, in its nature a 
Universal personified, as Life, Soul, Spirit, etc. 
Will not this prove it to be a deeper feeling, and 
of such intimate affinity with ideas, so as to mod- 
ify them and become one with them ; whereas 
the appetites and the feelings of revenge and 
anger coexist with the ideas, not combine with 
them, and alter the apparent effect of this form, 
not the forms themselves ? Certain modifications 
of fear seem to approach nearest to this love- 
sense in its manner of acting. 

Those whispers just as you have fallen asleep 
— what are they, and whence ? 



LITTERA 
SCRIPTA 

MANET 

Monday, 
Feb. 11, 
1805 



I must own to a superstitious dread of the 
destruction of paper worthy of a Mahometan. 
But I am also ashamed to confess to myself what 
pulling back of heart I feel whenever I wish to 
light a candle or kindle a fire with a Hospital or 
Harbor Report, and what a cumulus lies on my 
table, I not able to conjecture of what use they 
can ever be, and yet trembling lest what I then 
destroyed might be of some use in the way of 
knowledge. This seems to be the excess of a 
good feeling, but it is ridiculous. 
102 



ANIMA POETiE 

It is not without a certain sense of seK- cowper's 
reproof, as well as self-distrust, that I ask, or mrs^un-^" 
rather that my understanding suggests to me^^^^" 
the query, whether this divine poem (in so origi- 
nal a strain of thought and feeling honorable to 
human nature) would not have been more j)er- 
fect if the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas had 
been omitted, and the tenth and eleventh trans- 
posed so as to stand as the third and fourth. It 
is not, perhaps not at all, but, certainly, not 
principally that I feel any meanness in the 
" needles ; " but, not to mention that the words 
" once a shining store " is a speck in the dia- 
mond (in a less dear poem I might, perhaps, 
have called it more harshly a rhjme-hotcli), and 
that the word " restless " is rather too strong an 
impersonation for the serious tone, the reaZness 
of the poem, and seems to tread too closely on 
the mock heroic ; but that it seems not true to 
poetic feeling to introduce the affecting circum- 
stance of dimness of sight from decay of nature 
on an occasion so remote from the to KaOoXov^ 
and that the fifth stanza, graceful and even 
affecting as the spirit of the playfulness is or 
would be, at least, in a poem having less depth 
of feeling, breaks in painfully here — the age 
and afflicting infirmities both of the writer and 
his subject seem abhorrent from such trifling of 
— scarcely fancy, for I fear, if it were analyzed, 
that the whole effect woidd be found to depend 
on phrases hackneyed, and taken from the alms- 
house of the Muses. The test would be this: 
read the poem to a well-educated but natural 
woman, an unaffected, gentle being, endued with 
sense and sensibility — substituting the tenth 
103 



LOGY 



ANIMA POET^ 

and eleventh stanzas for those three, and some 
days after show her the poem as it now stands. 
I seem to be sure that she would be shocked — 
an alien would have intruded himself, and be 
found sitting in a circle of dear friends whom 
she expected to have found all to themselves. 

ETYMo- To say that etymology is a science is to use 

this word in its laxest and improper sense. But 
our language, except, at least, in poetry, has 
dropj)ed the word "lore" — the lehre of the 
Germans, the logos of the Greek. Either we 
should have retained the word and ventured on 
root-lore^ verse-lore., etc., or have adopted the 
Greek as a single word as well as a word in 
combination. All novelties appear, or are ratVer 
felt, as ridiculous in language ; but, if it had betin. 
once adopted, it would have been no stranger ico 
have said that etymoloffy is a logy which perishes 
from a plethora of probability, than that the art 
of war is an art apparently for the destruction 
and subjugation of particular states, but X-eally 
for the lessening of bloodshed and the preserva- 
tion of the liberties of mankind. Art and Sci- 
ence are both too much appropriated — our lan- 
guage wants terms of comprehensive generality, 
implying the kind, not the degree or sjjecies, as 
in that good and necessary word sensuous, which 
we have likewise dropped, opposed to sensual, 
sensitive, sensible, etc., etc. Chymistry has felt 
this difficulty, and found the necessity of having 
one word for the supposed cause, another for the 
effect, as in caloric or calorific, opposed to heat; 
and psychology has still more need of the refor- 
mation. 

104 



ANIMA POET^ 

The Queen-bee in the hive of Popish Error, skxxi- 
thc great mother of the swarm, seems to me ^'"^'^' ^^^ 
their tenet concerning Faith and Works, niacin' - ".r-- 
the former wholly in the rectitude, nay, in the "' 
Tightness of intellectual conviction, and the latter 
m the definite and, most often, the material 
action, and, consequently, the assertion of the 
dividuous nature and self-existence of works 
?r''l *^f^^^°^*"°^ of damnation out of the 
Church of Rome -of the one visible Church - 
of the absolute efficiency in se of all the Sacra- 
ments and the absolute merit of ceremonial ob- 
servanc^es. Consider the incalculable advantage 
of chiefly dwelling on the virtues of the heart, 
of habits of feeling and harmonious action, the 
music of the adjusted string at the impulse of 
the breeze, and, on the other hand, the evils of 
books concerning particular actions, minute cases 
ot conscience, hair-splitting directions and deci- 
sions, O how illustrated by the detestable char- 
acter of most of the Eoman Catholic casuists! 
iNo actions should be distinctly described but 
such as manifestly tend to awaken the heart to 
efficient feeling, whether of fear or of love — 
actions that, falling back on the fountain, keep 
It full, or clear out the mud from its pipes, and 
make it play in its abundance, shining in that 
purity m which, at once, the purity and the lio-ht 
IS each the cause of the other, the light purffy- 
ing, and the purified receiving and reflecting the 
light sending it off to others; not, like the 
polished mirror, by reflection from itself, but bv 
transmission through itself. 
105 



ANIMA POETiE 

Friday + Saturday, 12-1 o'clock [March 2, 
1805]. 
THE EM- What a sky ! the not yet orbed moon, the 
spotted oval, blue at one edge from the deep 
utter blue of the sky — a mass of ^;ea7"Z-white 
cloud belov/, distant, and travelling to the hori- 
zon, but all the upper part of the ascent and all 
the height such profound blue, deep as a deep 
river, and deep in color, and those two depths so 
entirely one, as to give them eaning and expla- 
nation of the two different significations of the 
epithet. Here, so far from divided, they were 
scarcely distinct, scattered over with thin pearl- 
white cloudlets — hands and fingers — the largest 
not larger than a floating veil ! Unconsciously 
I stretched forth my arms as to embrace the 
sky, and in a trance I had worshipped God in 
the moon — the spirit, not the form. I felt in 
how innocent a feeling Sabeism might have 
begun. Oh ! not only the moon, but the depths 
of the sky ! The moon was the idea ; but deep 
sky is, of all visual impressions, the nearest akin 
to a feeling. It is more a feeling than a sight, 
or, rather, it is the melting away and entire 
imion of feeling and sight ! 

DisTEM- Monday morning, which I ought not to have 

WORST known not to be Sunday night, 2 o'clock, March 
CALAMITY 4^ 1805^ 

My dreams to-night were interfused with 
struggle and fear, though, till the very last, not 
victors ; but the very last, which awoke me, was 
a completed nightmare, as it gave the idea and 
sensation of actual grasp or touch contrary to 
my will and in apparent consequence of the 
106 



ANIMA POETiE 

malignant will of the external form, whether 
actually appearing or, as sometimes happened, 
believed to exist — in which latter case I have 
two or three times felt a horrid touch of hatred, 
a grasp, or a weight of hate and horror abstracted 
from all [conscious] form or supposal of form, 
an ahstract touchy an abstract grasp, an abstract 
weight ! Quam nihil ad genium Papiliane 
tuum! or, in other words. This Mackintosh 
would prove to he nonsense by a Scotch smile. 
The last [dream], that woke me, though a true 
nightmare, was, however, a mild one. I cried 
out early, like a scarcely hurt child who knows 
himself within hearing of his mother. But, 
anterior to this, I had been playing with chil- 
dren, especially with one most lovely child, about 
two years or two and a half, and had repeated to 
her, in my dream, " The dews were falling fast," 
etc., and I was sorely frightened by the sneering 
and fiendish malignity of the beautiful creature, 
but from the beginning there had been a terror 
about it and proceeding from it. I shall here- 
after read the Vision in " Macbeth " with in- 
creased admiration. 

[" Quam nihil ad genium Papiniane tuum^^ 
was the motto of The Lyrical Ballads.'\ 

That deep intuition of our oweness — is it not 
at the bottom of many of our faults as well as 
virtues ? the dislike that a bad man should have 
any virtues, a good man any faults? And yet, 
too, a something noble and incentive is in 
this. 

What comfort in the silent eye upraised to 
107 



ANIMA POET^ 

THE OM- God ! " Tliou knowest." O ! what a tliouglit ! 
Never to be friendless, never to be unintelligible ! 
The omnipresence has been generally represented 
as a spy, a sort of Bentham's Panopticon.^ O 
to feel that the pain is to be utterly unintelligi- 
ble, and then — " O God, thou understandest ! " 



NISCIKNT 
THE COM- 
FORTER 



POETS AS The question should be fairly stated, how far a 

CRITICS -| -I J 1 •" p 

OF POETS man can be an adequate, or even a good (as tar 
' as he goes) though inadequate critic of poetry 

who is not a poet, at least in 2)0sse f Can he be 
an adequate, can he be a good critic, though not 
commensurate [with the poet criticised] ? But 
there is yet another distinction. Supposing he 
is not only a poet, but is a bad poet? What 
then ? 

IMMATURE [The] cause of the offence or disgust received 
March 16 ^Y ^^^^ mean in good poems when we are young, 
1805 g^jjjj i^g diminution and occasional evanescence 

when we are older in true taste [is] that, at 
first, we are from various causes delighted with 
generalities of nature which can all be expressed 
in dignified words ; but, afterwards, becoming 
more intimately acquainted with Nature in her 
detail, we are delighted with distinct, vivid ideas, 
and with vivid ideas most when made distinct, 
and can most often forgive and sometimes be 
delighted with even a low image from art or low 
life when it gives you the very thing by an illus- 
tration, as, for instance, Cowper's stream " inlay- 
ing " the level vale as with silver, and even 
Shakspere's " shrill-tongued Tapster's answering 

^ [ " A prison so constructed that the inspector can see each 
of the prisoners at all times without being seen by them." ] 

108 



TION AND 
SENSATION 



ANIMA POET^ 

shallow wits " applied to echoes in an echofull 
place. 

Of the not being able to know whether you atten 
are smoking in the dark or when your eyes are 
shut : item, of the ignorance in that state of the ^^^^ ^^' 
difference of beef, veal, etc., — it is all attention. 
Your ideas being shut, other images arise which 
you must attend to, it being the habit of a seeing 
man to attend chiefly to sight. So close your 
eyes, (and) you attend to the ideal images, and, 
attending to them, you abstract your attention. 
It is the same when deeply thinking in a reverie, 
you no longer hear distinct sound made to you. 
But what a strange inference that there were 
no sounds ! 



I love St. Combe or Columba, and he shall st. 
be my saint: for he is not in the Catalogue of 
Romish Saints, — having never been canonized 
at Rome, — and because this Ajjostle of the Picts 
lived and gave his name to an island on the 
Hebrides, and from him Switzerland was chris- 
tianized. 

" I will write," I said, " as truly as I can experi- 

P . , 1 • T • 1 1 • ENCE AND 

trom experience, actual individual experience, book 
not from book-knowledge." But yet it is won- ledge 
derful how exactly the knowledge from good Midnight, 
books coincides with the experience of men of 1805 
the world. How often, when I was younger, 
have I noticed the deep delight of men of the 
world who have taken late in life to literature, 
on coming across a passage the force of which 
109 



ANIMA POET^ 

had either escaped me altogether, or which I 
knew to be true from books only and at second 
hand ! Experience is necessary, no doubt, if 
only to give a light and shade in the mind, to 
give to some one idea a greater vividness than to 
others, and thereby to make it a Thing of Tivie 
and actual reality. For all ideas being equally 
vivid, the whole becomes a dream. But, notwith- 
standing this and other reasons, I yet believe 
that the saws against book-knowledge are handed 
down to us from times when books conveyed only 
abstract science or abstract morality and reli- 
gion. Whereas, in the present day, what is there 
of real life, in all its goings-on, trades, manufac- 
tures, high life, low life, animate and inanimate, 
that is not to be found in books ? In these days 
books are conversation. And this, I know, is for 
evil as well as good, but for good, too, as well as 
evil. 

DUTY AND How feebly, how unlike an English cock, 
terest" that cock crows and the other answers! Did 
Sunday J jj^^. particularly notice the ?f?ilikeness on my 

morning', v J ^ ^J 

4 o'clock, first arrival at Malta ? Well, to-day I will dis- 
1805 ' burthen my mind. Yet one thing strikes me : 
the difference I find in myself during the past 
year or two. My enthusiasm for the happiness 
of mankind in particular places and countries, 
and my eagerness to promote it, seems to de- 
crease, and my sense of duty, my hauntings of 
conscience, from any stain of thought or action 
to increase in the same ratio. I remember hav- 
ing written a strong letter to my most dear 
and honored Wordsworth in consequence of 
his " Ode to Duty," and in that letter explained 
110 



ANIMA POETiE 

this as the effect of selfness in a mind incapable 
of gross self-interest — I mean, the decrease of 
hope and joy, the soul in its round and round 
flight forming narrower circles, till at every gyre 
its wings beat against the "personal self. But let 
me examine this more accurately. It may be 
that the phenomena will come out more honor- 
able to our nature. 

It is as trite as it is mournful (but yet most evil pro- 
instructive), and by the genius that can pro- ^vi^l^ 
duce the strongest impressions of novelty by 
rescuing the stalest and most admitted truths 
from the impotence caused by the very circum- 
stance of their universal admission — admitted so 
instantly as never to be reflected on, never by 
that sole key of reflection admitted into the 
effective, legislative chamber of the heart — so 
true that they lose all the privileges of Truth, 
and, as extremes meet by being truisins, cor- 
respond in utter inefficiency with universally 
acknowledged errors (in Algebraic symbols 
Truisms = Falsehoodisms =00} — by that genius, 
I say, might good be worked in considering the 
old, old Methusalem saw that "evil produces 
evil." One error almost compels another. Tell 
one lie, tell a hundred. Oh, to show this, a 
jjriori, by bottoming it in all our faculties and 
by experience of touching examples ! 



The favorite object of all Oriental tales, and john 
that which, whilst it inspired their authors in worth" 
the East, still inspires their readers everywhere, ^^°"f ^^' 
is the impossibility of baffling Destiny — the per- i^Oo 
ception that what we considered as the means 
111 



ANIMA POET^ 

of one thing becomes, in a strange manner, 
the direct means of the reverse. O dear John 
Wordsworth ! what joy at Grasmere that you 
were made Captain of the Abergavenny, and 
so young too! Now it was next to certain 
that you would in a few years settle in your 
native hills and be verily one of the Concern ! 
Then came your share in the brilliant action 
with Linois. (I was at Grasmere in spirit only, 
but in spirit I was one of the rejoicers — as joy- 
ful as any, and, perhaps, more joyous !) This, 
doubtless, not only enabled you to lay in a 
larger and more advantageous cargo, but pro- 
cured you a voyage to India instead of China, 
and in this circumstance a next to certainty of 
independence — and all these were decoys of 
Death ! Well, but a nobler feeling than these 
vain regrets would become the friend of the 
man whose last words were : " I have done my 
duty ! let her go ! " Let us do our duty ! all 
else is a dream, life and death alike a dream. 
This short sentence would comprise, I believe, 
the sum of all profound j)hilosophy, of ethics 
and metaphysics conjointly, from Plato to 
Fichte ! 

[ Vide Letters of 8. T. C, 1895, il. 495, note.'] 

LOVE THE The best, the truly lovely in each and all, is 
God. Therefore the truly beloved is the symbol 
of God to whomever it is truly beloved by, but 
it may become perfect and maintained love by 
the function of the two. The lover worships in 
his beloved that final consummation of itself which 
is produced in his own soul by the action of the 
soul of the beloved upon it, and that final percep- 
112 



DIVINE 
ESSENCE 



ANIMA POET^ 

tion of the soul of tlie beloved which is in part the 
consequence of the reaction of his (so amelio- 
rated and regenerated) soul upon the soul of his 
beloved, till each contemplates the soul of the 
other as involving his own, both in its givings 
and its receivings, and thus, still keeping alive 
its outness, its self-ohlivion united with self- 
warmth, still approximates to God! Where 
shall I find an image for this sublime symbol 
which, ever involving the presence of Deity, yet 
tends towards it ever ? Shall it be in the attrac- 
tive powers of the different surfaces of the earth? 
each attraction the vicegerent and representative 
of the central attraction, and yet being no other 
than that attraction itself ? By some such feelin er- 
as this I can easily believe the mind of Fenelon 
and Madame Guyon to have colored its faith in 
the worship of saints, but that was most danger- 
ous. It was not idolatry in them, but it encour- 
aged idolatry in others. Now, the pure love of 
a good man for a good woman does not involve 
this evil, but it multiplies, intensifies the good. 

Dreamt that I was saying or reading, or that order in 
it was read to me, " Varrius thus prophesied "''^''^^ 
vinegar at his door by damned frigid trem- 
blings." Just after, I woke. I fell to sleep 
again, having in the previous doze meditated on 
the possibility of making dreams regular : and 
just as I had passed on the other side of the con- 
fine of dozing, I afforded this specimen : " I 
should have thought it Vossius rather than Var- 
rius, though, Varrius being a great poet, the 
idea would have been more suitable to him, only 
that all his writings were unfortunately lost in 
113 



ANIMA POETiE 

the Arrowr Again I awoke. N. B. — The 
Arroio^ Captain Vincent's frigate, from which 
our Malta letters and dispatches had been pre- 
viously thrown overboard, was taken by the 
French, in February, 1805. This illustrates the 
connection qj dreams. 

ORANGE I never had a more lovely twig of orange-blos- 
Aprif 8^ soms, with four old last year's leaves with their 
1^^^ steady green well-placed among them, than to- 

day, and with a rose-twig of three roses [it] 
made a very striking nosegay to an Englishman. 
The orange twig was so very full of blossoms 
that one-fourth of the number becoming fruit of 
the natural size would have broken the twig off. 
Is there, then, disproportion here ? or waste ? O 
no ! no ! In the first place, here is a prodigality 
of beauty ; and what harm do they do by exist- 
ing ? And is not man a being capable of Beauty 
even as of Hunger and Thirst? And if the 
latter be fit objects of a final cause, why not the 
former? But secondly [Nature] hereby multi- 
plies manifold the chances of a proper number 
becoming fruit ; in this twig, for instance, for 
one set of accidents that would have been fatal 
to the year's growth if only as many blossoms 
had been on it as it was designed to bear fruit, 
there may now be three sets of accidents — and 
no harm done. And, thirdly and lastly, for me 
at least — or, at least, at present, for in nature 
doubtless there are many additional reasons, and 
possibly for me at some future hour of reflection, 
after some new influx of information from books 
or observance — and, thirdly, these blossoms are 
Fruit, fruit to the winged insect, fruit to man — 
114 



ANIMA POET^ 

yea ! and of more solid value, perhaps, than the 
orange itself ! O how the Bees be-throng and 
be-murmur it ! O how the honey tells the tale 
of its birthplace to the sense of sight and odor ! 
and to how many minute and uneyeable insects 
beside ! So, I cannot but think, ought I to be 
talking to Hartley, and sometimes to detail all 
the insects that have arts or implements resem- 
bling human — the sea-snails, with the nautilus 
at their head ; the wheel-insect, the galvanic eel, 
etc. 

[This note was printed in the Illustrated Lon- 
don Neios, June 10, 1893.] 

In looking at objects of Nature while I am anticipa- 
thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering ^'^j^^'' 
through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to ^^^' ^^ 

1 1 • •"; 7 . \. THOUGHT 

be seekmg, as it were asking for, a symbolical Saturday 
language for something within me that already Aprii'i4, 
and forever exists, than observing anything new. ^^^^ 
Even when that latter is the case, yet still I 
have always an obscure feeling as if that new 
phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgot- 
ten or hidden truth of my inner nature. It is 
still interesting as a word — a symbol. It is 
Aoyos, the Creator and the Evolver ! [Now] 
what is the right, the virtuous feeling, and conse- 
quent action when a man, having long meditated 
on and perceived a certain truth, finds another, a 
foreign writer, who has handled the same with 
an approximation to the truth as he had previ- 
ously conceived it? Joy ! Let Truth make her 
voice audible ! While I was preparing the pen 
to write this remark, I lost the train of thought 
which had led me to it. I meant to have asked 
115 



ANIMA POET^ 

sometliing else now forgotten. For the above 
answers itself. It needed no answer, I trust, in 
my heart. 

[Printed in Life of S. T. (7., by James Gill- 
man, 1838, p. 3li.] 

THE HOPE That beautiful passage in dear and honored 

MANiTY W. Wordsworth's " Michael," respecting the 

iund*'^ forward-looking Hope inspired preeminently by 

1805 the birth of a chijd, was brought to my mind 

most forcibly by my own independent though, in 

part, anticipated reflections on the importance of 

young children to the keeping up the stock of 

Hope in the human species. They seem to be 

the immediate and secreting organ of Hope in 

the great organized body of the whole human 

race, in all men considered as the component 

atoms of 3Ian — as young leaves are the organs 

of supplying vital air to the atmosphere. 

Thus living on through such a length of years. 
The Shepherd, if he loved himself, must needs 
Have loved his Helpmate ; but to Michael's 

heart 
This son of his old age was yet more dear — 
Less from instinctive tenderness, the same 
Fond spirit that blindly works in the blood of 

all — 
That that a child, more than all other gifts 
That earth can offer to declining man, 
Brings hope with it, and forward-looking 

thoughts. 
And stirrings of inquietude, when they 
By tendency of nature needs must fail. 
Poetical Worhs of W. Wordsworth, p. 133. 
116 



ANIMA POETxE 

The English and German climates and that the 
of northern France possess, among many others, easter "^^ 
this one little beauty of uniting the mysteries J^^^^ter 

.IIP 1 1. . Sunday, 

of positive with those oi natural religion — in 1805 
celebrating the symbolical resurrection of the 
human soul in that of the Crucified, at the time 
of the actual resurrection of the "living life" of 
nature. 

Religion consists in truth and virtue, that is, spiritual 
the permanent, the forma efformans^ in the flux 
of things without, of feelings and images within. 
Well, therefore, does the Scripture speak of the 
Spirit as praying to the Spirit, " The Lord said 
to my Lord." God is the essence as well as the 
object of religion. 

I would not willingly kill even a flower, but a supposi- 
were I at the head of an army, or a revolutionary Wednes- 
kingdom, I would do my duty ; and though it 17 ^igos'^'* 
should be the ordering of the military execution 
of a city, yet, supposing it to be my duty, I 
would give the order — and then, in awe, listen 
to the uproar, even as to a thunderstorm — the 
awe as tranquil, the submission to the inevitable, 
to the unconnected with myself, as profound. It 
should be as if the lightning of heaven passed 
along my sword and destroyed a man. 

Does the sober judgment previously measure enthusi- 
out the banks between which the stream of ^^^^ 
enthusiasm shall rush with its torrent-sound? 
Far rather does the stream Itself plough up its 
own channel and find its banks in the adamant 
rocks of nature ! 

117 *r 



ANIMA POET^ 



ADH.ESIT There are times when my thoughts — how like 
MENTo music ! O that these times were more frequent ! 
^'^^ But how can they be, I being so hopeless, and 

for months past so incessantly employed in offi- 
cial tasks, subscribing, examining, administering 
oaths, auditing, and so forth ? 

THE REAL- Johu Tobin dead, and just after the success of 
OF^DEATH his play ! and Robert Allen dead suddenly ! 

O when we are young we lament for death 
only by sympathy, or with the general feeling 
with which we grieve for misfortunes in general, 
but there comes a time (and this year is the 
time that has come to me) when we lament for 
death as death, when it is felt for itself, and as 
itself, aloof from all its consequences. Then 
comes the gravestone into the heart with all its 
mournful names ; then the bellman's or clerk's 
verses subjoined to the bills of mortality are no 
longer commonplace. 

[John Tobin, the dramatist, died December 7, 
1804. His play entitled " The Honeymoon " 
was published in 1805. 

Robert Allen, Coleridge's contemporary and 
school-friend, held the post of deputy-surgeon to 
the 2d Royals, then on service in Portugal. He 
was a friend of Dr. (afterwards Sir J.) Stod- 
dart, with whom Coleridge stayed on his first 
arrival at Malta. See Letters of Charles Lamb^ 
MacmiUan, 1888, i. 188.] 

LOVE AND Wiirde, worthiness, virtue, consist in the 

""^^ mastery over the sensuous and sensual impulses ; 

but love requires innocence. Let the lover 

ask his heart whether he can endure that his 

118 



ANIMA POET^ 

mistress should have struggled with a sensual 
impulse for another man, though she overcame 
it from a sense of duty to him. Women are 
LESS offended with men, in part, from the vicious 
habits of men, and, in part, from the difference 
of bodily constitution. Yet, still, to a pure and 
truly loving woman this must be a painful 
thought. That he should struggle with and 
overcome ambition, desire of fortune, superior 
beauty, etc., or with objectless desire of any 
kind, is pleasing, but not that he has struggled 
with positive, appropriated desire, that is, desire 
with an object. Love, in short, requires an 
absolute peace and harmony between all parts of 
human nature, such as it is ; and it is offended 
by any war, though the battle should be decided 
in favor of the worthier. This is, perhaps, the 
final cause of the rarity of true love, and the 
efficient and immediate cause of its difficulty. 
Ours is a life of probation. We are to contem- 
plate and obey duty for its own sake, and in 
order to do this, we, in our present imperfect 
state of being, must see it not merely abstracted 
from but in direct opposition to the imsh, the 
inclination. Having perfected this, the highest 
possibility of human nature, man may then with 
safety harmonize all his being with this — he 
may love. To perform duties absolutely from 
the sense of duty is the ideal which, perhaps, no 
human being ever can arrive at, but which every 
human being ought to try to draw near unto. 
This is, in the only wise, and verily in a most 
sublime sense, to see God face to face, which, 
alas ! it seems too true that no man can do and 
live, that is, a human life. It would become 
119 



ANIMA POETiE 

incompatible with his organization, or rather, 
it would transmute it, and the process of that 
transmutation, to the senses of other men, would 
be called death. Even as to the caterpillar, in 
all probability the caterpillar dies, and he either, 
which is most probable, does not see (or, at all 
events, does not see the connection between the 
caterpillar and) the butterfly, the beautiful Psyche 
of the Greeks. 



HAPPI- 
NESS 
MADE 
PERFECT 



Those who in this life love in perfection, if 
such there be, in proportion as their love has 
no struggles, see God darkly and through a veil. 
For when duty and pleasure are absolutely coin- 
cident, the very nature of our organization ne- 
cessitates that duty will be contemplated as the 
symbol of pleasure, instead of pleasure being (as 
in a future life we have faith it will be) the 
symbol of duty. For herein lies the distinction 
between human and angelic happiness. Hu- 
manly happy I call him who in enjoyment finds 
his duty ; angelically happy he who seeks and 
finds his duty in enjoyment. 

Happiness in general may be defined, not the 
aggregate of pleasurable sensations, — for this is 
either a dangerous error and the creed of sen- 
sualists, or else a mere translation or wordy 
paraphrase, — but the state of that person who, 
in order to enjoy his nature in the highest man- 
ifestation of conscious feeling, has no need of 
doing wrong, and who, in order to do right, is 
under no necessity of abstaining from enjoy- 
ment. 

[ Vide Life of S. T. (7., by James Gillman, 
1838, pp. 176-178.] 

120 



ANIMA POET^ 

Thought and reality are, as it were, two dis- thought 
tinct corresponding sounds, of which no man can things 
say positively which is the voice and which the 
echo. 

Oh, the beautiful fountain or natural well at 
Upper Stowey ! The images of the weeds which 
hung down from its sides appear as plants grow- 
ing up, straight and upright, among the water- 
weeds that really grow from the bottom of the 
well, and so vivid was the image that for some 
moments, and not till after I had disturbed the 
water, did I perceive that their roots were not 
neighbors, and they side -by -side companions. 
So ever, then I said, — so are the happy man's 
thoughts and things [or in the language of the 
modern philosophers] his ideas and impressions. 

The two characteristics which I have most ob- supersti- 
served in Roman Catholic mummery processions, 
baptism, etc., are, first, the immense 7ioise and 
jingle-jingle as if to frighten away the daemon 
common sense ; and, secondly, the unmoved, stu- 
pid, uninterested faces of the conjurers. I have 
noticed no exception. Is not the very nature of 
superstition in general, as being utterly sensuous, 
cold except where it is sensual f Hence the 
older form of idolatry, as displayed in the Greek 
mythology, was, in some sense, even preferable 
to the popish. For whatever life did and could 
exist in superstition it brought forward and sanc- 
tified in its rites of Bacchus, Venus, etc. The 
papist by pretence of suppression wards and de- 
naturalizes. In the pagan [ritual, superstition] 
burnt with a bright flame ; in the popish it con- 
sumes the soul with a smothered fire that stinks 
121 



ANIMA POET^ 

in darkness and smoulders like gum that burns 
but is incapable of light. 

ILLUSION At the Treasury, La Valetta, Malta, in the 
raidni^t, room the windows of which directly face the Pi- 
1805 ^"' azzas and vast saloon built for the archives and 
Library and now used as the Garrison Ballroom, 
sitting at one corner of a large parallelogram ta- 
ble well littered with books, in a red arm chair, a t 
the other corner of which (diagonally) J i 

Mr. Dennison had been sitting ; he and I hav- 
ing conversed for a long time, he bade me good- 
night, and retired. I, meaning to retire, too, 
however, sunk for five minutes or so into a doze, 
and on suddenly awaking up I saw him as dis- 
tinctly sitting in the chair as I had, really, some 
ten minutes before. I was startled, and thinking 
of it, sunk into a second doze, out of which awak- 
ing as before I saw again the same appearance ; not 
more distinct indeed, but more of his form ; for 
at the first time I had seen only his face and 
bust, but now I saw as much as I could have 
seen if he had been really there. The appear- 
ance was very nearly that of a person seen 
through thin smoke distinct indeed, but yet a 
sort of distinct shape and color, with a dimin- 
ished sense of substantiality — like a face in a 
clear stream. My nerves had been violently 
agitated yesterday morning by the attack of 
three dogs as I was mounting the steps of Cap- 
tain Pasley's door — two of them savage Bed- 
ouins, who wounded me in the calf of my left leg. 
I have noted this down, not three minutes having 
intervened since the illusion took place. Often 
and often I have had similar experiences, and, 
122 



ANIMA POET^ 

therefore, resolved to write down tlie particulars 
whenever any new instance should occur, as a 
weapon against superstition, and an exjilanation 
of ghosts — Banquo in " Macbeth " the very 
same thing. I once told a lady the reason why I 
did not believe in the existence of ghosts, etc., 
was that I had seen too many of them myself. 
N. B. There were on the table a common black 
wine-bottle, a decanter of water, and, between 
these, one of the half-gallon glass flasks which 
Sir G. Beaumont had given me (four of these 
full of port), the cork in, covered with leather, 
and having a white plated ring on the top. I men- 
tion this because since I wrote the former pages, 
on blinldng a bit a third time, and opening my 
eyes, I clearly detected that this high-shouldered 
hyi^ochondriacal bottle-man had a great share in 
producing the effect. The metamorphosis was 
clearly beginning, though I snapped the spell be- 
fore it had assumed a recognizable form. The 
red-leather armchair was so placed at the corner 
that the flask was exactly between me and it — 
and the lamp being close to my corner of the 
large table, and not giving much light, the chair 
was rather obscure, and the brass nails where the 
leather was fastened to the outward wooden rim 
reflecting the light more copiously were seen al- 
most for themselves. What if instead of imme- 
diately checking the sight, and then pleased with 
it as a philosophical case^ I had been frightened, 
and encouraged it, and my understanding had 
joined its vote to that of my senses ? 

My own shadow, too, on the wall not far from 
Mr. D.'s chair — the white paper, the sheet of 
Harbor Reports lying spread out on the table on 
123 



ANIMA POET^ 

the other side of the bottles — influence of mere 
color, influence of shape — wonderful coalescence 
of scattered colors at distances, and, then, all go- 
ing to some one shape, and the modification! 
Likewise I am more convinced by repeated obser- 
vation that, perhaps, always in a very minute de- 
gree but assuredly in certain states and postures 
of the eye, as in drowsiness ; in the state of the 
brain and nerves after distress or agitation, es- 
pecially if it had been accompanied by weeping, 
and in many others, we see our own faces, and 
project them according to the distance given them 
by the degree of indistinctness — that this may 
occasion in the highest degree the Wraith (vide 
a hundred Scotch stories, but, better than all, 
Wordsworth's most wonderful and admirable 
poem " Peter Bell," when he sees his own figure) ; 
and still oftener that it facilitates the formation 
of a human face out of some really present object, 
and from the alteration of the distance among 
other causes never suspected as the occasion and 
substratum. S. T. C. 

N. B. This is a valuable note, re-read by me, 
Tuesday morning, May 14. 

[Compare Table Talk for January 3 and May 
1, 1823, Bell & Co., 1884, pp. 20, 31-33. See, 
too, The Friend^ First Landing-Place Essay, iii., 
Coleridge^ s Works, Harper & Brothers, 1853, ii. 
134-137. 

FOR THE Mem. Always to bear in mind that profound 
iN^AB-"^'' sentence of Leibnitz that men's intellectual 
errors consist chiefly in denying. What they 
affirm with feeling is, for the most part, right — 
124 



SENCE 



ANIMA POET^ 

if it be a real affirmation, and not affirmative in 
form, negative in reality. As, for instance, 
when a man praises the French stage, meaning 
and implying his dislike of Shakspere [and the 
Jiiiizabethan dramatists], 

"Facts — stubborn facts! None of your 
theory ! " A most entertaining and instructive 
essay might be written on this text, and the 
sooner the better. Trace it from the most ab- 
surd credulity — e.(7., in Fracastorius' De Sym- 
pathia, cap. i,, and the Alchemy Book — even 
to that of your modern agriculturists, relating 
their own facts and swearing against each other 
like ships' crews. O ! it is the relation of the 
tacts — not the facts, friend ! 

SpeciUative men are wont to be condemned 
by the general. But who more speculative than 
hir ^ alter Raleigh, and he, even he, brought in 
the potato to Europe. Good heavens ! let me 
never eat a roasted potato without dwelling on 
It, and detailing its train of consequences, 
l^ikewise, too, duUous to the philosopher, but 
to be clapped chorally by the commercial world 
he, this mere wild speculatist, introduced to' 
bacco. 

For a nation to make peace only because it is 

tired of war, and, as it were, in order just to take 

breath, is m direct subversion of the end and 

object of the war which was its sole justification. 

i IS like a poor way-sore foot-traveUer getting up 

to Ws ^ '""^'^ ^^""^ '' ^""'"^ *^' '°"*'^'^ ""^^ 
125 



ANIMA POET^ 

The eye hatli a twofold power. It is, verily, 
a window through which you not only look out 
of the house, but can look into it too. A states- 
man and diplomatist should for this reason 
always wear spectacles. 

Worldly men gain their purposes with worldly 
men by that instinctive belief in sincerity. 
Hence (nothing immediately and passionately 
contradicting it) the effect of the " with un- 
feigned esteem," " entire devotion," and the 
other smooth phrases in letters, all, in short, 
that sea-officers call oil, and of which they, with 
all their bluntness, well understand the use. 

The confusion of metaphor with reality is one 
of the fountains of the many-headed Nile of 
credulity, which, overflowing its banks, covers 
the world with miscreations and reptile mon- 
sters, and feeds by its many mouths the sea of 
blood. 

A ready command of a limited number of 
words is but a playing cat-cradle dexterously 
with language. 

Plain contra-reasoning may be compared with 
boxing with fists. Controversy with boxing is 
the cestus, that is, the lead-loaded glove, like the 
pugilists in the ^Eneid. But the stiletto ! the 
envenomed stiletto is here. What worse ? — 
(a Germanism). Yes ! the poisoned Italian glove 
of mock friendship. 

The more I reflect, the more exact and close 

126 



ANIMA POET^ 

appears to me the analogy between a watch and 
watches, and the conscience and consciences of 
men, on the one hand, and that between the sun 
and motion of the heavenly bodies in general 
and the reason and goodness of the Supreme on 
the other. Never goes quite right any one, no 
two go exactly the same ; they derive their 
dignity and use as being substitutes and expo- 
nents of heavenly motions, but still, in a thou- 
sand instances, they are and must be our instruc- 
tors by which we must act, in practice presuming 
a coincidence while theoretically we are aware 
of incalculable variations. 

One lifts up one's eyes to heaven, as if to seek 
there what one had lost on earth — eyes, 

Whose half-beholdings through unsteady tears 
Gave shape, hue, distance to the iuward dream. 

Schiller, disgusted with Kotzebuisms, deserts great 
from Shakspere ! What ! cannot we condemn 
a counterfeit and yet remain admirers of the 
original ? This is a sufficient proof that the first worth 
admiration was not sound, or foimded on sound 
distinct perceptions, [or if sprung from] a sound 
feeling, yet clothed and manifested to the con- 
sciousness by false ideas. And now the French 
stage is to be re-introduced. O Germany ! 
Germany ! why this endless rage for novelty ? 
Why this endless looking out of thyself? But 
stop, let me not fall into the pit against which 
I was about to warn others. Let me not con- 
fomid the discriminating character and genius 
of a nation with the conflux of its individuals 
in cities and reviews. Let England be Sir 
127 



MEN THE 
CRITERION 

OF NA- 
TIONAL 



ANIMA POET^ 

Philip Sidney, Shakspere, Milton, Bacon, Har- 
rington, Swift, Wordsworth ; and never let the 
names of Darwin, Johnson, Hume, fur it over. 
If these, too, must be England let them be 
another England ; or, rather, let the first be old 
England, the spiritual, Platonic old England ; 
and the second, with Locke at the head of the 
philosophers and Pope [at the head] of the 
poets, together with the long list of Priestleys, 
Paleys, Hayleys, Darwins, Mr. Pitts, Dundasses, 
etc., etc., be the representatives of commer- 
cial Great Britian. These have [indeed] their 
merits, but are as alien to me as the Manda- 
rin philosophers and poets of China. Even so 
Leibnitz, Lessing, Voss, Kant, shall be Germany 
to me, let whatever coxcombs rise up, and shrill 
it away in the grasshopper vale of reviews. 
And so shall Dante, Ariosto, Giordano Bruno, 
be my Italy ; Cervantes my Spain ; and O ! that 
I could find a France for my love. But spite 
of Pascal, Madame Guyon and Moliere, France 
is my Babylon, the mother of whoredoms in 
morality, philosophy, and taste. The French 
themselves feel a foreignness in these writers. 
How indeed is it possible at once to lorn Pascal 
and Voltaire ? 



AN INTEL- 
LECTUAL, 
PURGA- 
TORY 

Tuesday 
morning, 
May 14, 

1805 



With any distinct remembrance of a past 
life there could be no fear of death as death, 
no idea even of death ! Now, in the next state, 
to meet with the Luthers, Miltons, Leibnitzs, 
Bernouillis, Bonnets, Shaksperes, etc., and to 
live a longer and better life, the good and wise 
entirely among the good and wise, might serve 
as a step to break the abruptness of an imme- 
128 



ANIMA POETiE 

diate Heaven? But it must be a human life; 
and though the faith in a hereafter would be 
more firm, more undoubting, yet, still, it must 
not be a sensuous remembrance of a death passed 
over. No ! [it would be] something like a dream 
that you had not died, but had been taken off ; 
in short, the real events with the obscurity of a 
dream, accompanied with the notion that you 
had never died, but that death was yet to come. 
As a man who, having walked in his sleep, by 
rapid openings of his eyes— too rapid to be 
observable by others or rememberable by him- 
self — sees and remembers the whole of his path, 
mixing it with many fancies ah intra, and, awak- 
ing, remembers, but yet as a dream. 

'T is one source of mistakes concerning the of first 
merits of poems, that to those read in youth ^"""^^^ 
men attribute all that praise which is due to 
poetry in general, merely considered as select 
language in metre. (Little children should not 
be taught verses, in my opinion; better not to 
let them set eyes on verse till they are ten or 
eleven years old.) Now, poetry produces two 
kinds of pleasure, one for each of the two 
master-movements and impulses of man, — the 
gratification of the love of variety, and the 
gratification of the love of uniformity ; and that 
by a recurrence delightful as a painless and yet 
exciting act of memory — tiny breezelets of sur- 
prise, each one destroying the ripplets which 
the former had made, yet all together keeping 
the surface of the mind in a bright dimple-smile. 
So, too, a hatred of vacancy is reconciled with 
the love of rest. These and other causes often 
129 



ANIMA POET^ 

make [a first acquaintance with] poetry an over- 
powering delight to a lad of feeling, as I have 
heard Poole relate of himself respecting Edwin 
and Angelina. But so it would be with a man 
bred up in a wilderness by Unseen Beings, who 
should yet converse and discourse rationally 
with him — how beautiful would not the first 
other man apjjear whom he saw and knew to be 
a man by the resemblance to his own image 
seen in the clear stream ; and would he not, in 
like manner, attribute to the man all the divine 
attributes of humanity, though, haply, he should 
be a very ordinary, or even a most ugly man, 
compared with a hundred others ? Many of us 
who have felt this with respect to women have 
been bred up where few are to be seen ; and I 
acknowledge that, both in persons and in poems, 
it is well on the whole that we should retain our 
first love, though, alike in both cases, evils have 
happened as the consequence. 

THE MAD- The excellent fable of the maddening rain 
R^rN""^ I have found in Drayton's " Moon Calf," most 
^ol"^* ^' miserably marred in the telling ! vastly inferior 
to Benedict Fay's Latin exposition of it, and 
that is no great thing. Vide his Lucretian 
Poem on the Newtonian System. Never was a 
finer tale for a satire, or, rather, to conclude a 
long satirical poem of five or six hundred lines. 

[For excellent use of this fable, see The 
Friend^ No. 1, June 9, 1809, Coleridge's 
Worhs^ Harper and Brothers, ii. 21, 22.] 

Pasley remarked last night (2d August, 
1805), and with great precision and original- 
130 



ANIMA POET^E 

ity, that men themselves, in the present age, senti- 
were not so much degraded as their sentiments. ^™^ 
Xhis IS most true ! almost all men nowadays act morals 
and feel more nobly than they think — yet still 
the vile, cowardly, selfish, calcidating ethics of 
Paley, Priestley, Locke, and other Erastians do 
woefully influence and determine our course of 
action. 

O the complexities of the ravel produced by time and 
time struggling with eternity ! a and 6 are dif- '^"^e^^^y 
ferent, and eternity or duration makes them one 
— this we call modification — the principle of 
all greatness in finite beings, the principle of all 
contradiction and absurdity. 



It is worthy notice (shown in the phrase " I 

g THE MOT 



envy him such and such a thing," meaning ^'""^ '"°'' 



only, " I regret I cannot share with him, have Au^'^'^'^s 
the same as he, without depriving him of it, or isos 
any part of it"), the instinctive passion in the ^^^^'^^^ 
mind for a one word to express one act of feeling 
— [one], that is, in which, however complex in 
reality, the mind is conscious of no discursion 
and synthesis a posteriori. On this instinct rest 
all the improvements (and, on the habits formed 
by this instinct and [the] knowledge of these 
improvements. Vanity rears all the Apuleian, 
Apollonian, etc., etc., corruptions) of style. 
Even so with our Johnson. 

There are bulls of action equally as of bulls of 
thought, [for] (not to allude to the story of ^''"'''"' 
the Irish laborer who laid his comrade all his 
wages that he would not carry him down in 
131 



ANIMA POETiE 

his hod from the top to the bottom of a high 
house, down the ladder) the feeling of vindic- 
tive honor in duelling, and the feudal revenges 
anterior to duelling, formed a true bull; for 
they were superstitious Christians, knew it was 
wrong, and yet knew it was right — they would 
be damned deservedly if they did, and, if they 
did not, they thought themselves deserving df 
being damned. 

psEUDo- The pseudo-poets Campbell, Eogers, etc., both 
by their writings and moral character tend to 
bring poetry into disgrace, and, but that men 
in general are the slaves of the same wretched 
infirmities, they would [set their seal on this 
disgrace], and it would be well. The true poet 
could not smother the sacred fire ("his heart 
burnt within him and he spake"), and wisdom 
would be justified by her children. But the 
false poet, — that is, the no-poet, — finding poetry 
in contempt among the many, of whose praise, 
whatever he may affirm, he is alone ambitious, 
would be prevented from scribbling. 



POETS 



LANDING- 
PLACES 



The progress of human intellect from earth to 
heaven is not a Jacob's ladder, but a geometri- 
cal staircase with five or more landing-places. 
That on which we stand enables us to see clearly 
and count all below us, while that or those above 
us are so transparent for our eyes that they 
appear the canopy of heaven. We do not see 
them, and believe ourselves on the highest. 

["Among my earliest impressions I still 
distinctly remember that of my first entrance 
into the mansion of a neighboring baronet, 
132 



ANIMA POET.E 

awefuUy known to me by the name of the 
Great House [Escot, near Ottery St. Mary, 
Devon]. . . . Beyond all other objects I was 
most struck with the magnificent staircase, re- 
lieved at well-proportioned intervals by spacious 
landing-places. ... My readers will find no 
difficulty in translating these forms of the out- 
ward senses into their intellectual analogies, so 
as to understand the purport of The FriencTs 
Landing-Places. The Friend, "The Landing- 
Place," Essay iv., Coleridge's Worhs^ Harper &, 
Brothers, 1853, ii. 137, 138.] 

In the TJirenm of funeral songs and elegies william 
of our old poets, I am often impressed with ^'j,!''"'^^ 
the idea of their resemblance to hired weepers otteky 
in Rome and among the Irish, where he who 
howled the loudest and most wildly was the 
most capital mourner and was at the head of 
his trade. So [too] see William Browne's elegy 
on Prince Henry {Britt Past. Songs, v.), whom, 
perhaps, he never spoke to. Yet he is a dear 
fellow, and I love him, that W. Browne who 
died at Ottery, and with whose family my own 
is united, or, rather, connected and acquainted. 

[Colonel James Coleridge, the poet's eldest 
surviving brother, and Henry Langford Browne, 
of Combe-Satchfield, married sisters, Frances and 
Dorothy Taylor, whose mother was one of five 
co-heiresses of Richard Duke, of Otterton. 

It is uncertain whether a William Browne, of 
Ottery St. Mary, who died in 1645, was the 
author of The Shepherd's Pipe and Britannia's 
Pastorals. Two beautiful inscriptions on a 
tomb in St. Stephen's Chapel in the collegiate 
133 



ANIMA POET^ 



church of St. Mary Ottery were, in Southey's 
opinion (doubtless at Coleridge's suggestion), 
composed by the poet William Browne.] 



" ASCEND 
A STEP IN 
CHOOS- 
ING A 
FRIEND " 
TALMUD 



God knows! that at times I derive a com- 
fort even from my infirmities, my sins of omis- 
sion and commission, in the joy of the deep 
feeling of the opposite virtues in the two or 
three whom I love in my heart of hearts. Sharp, 
therefore, is the pain when I find faults in these 
friends opposite to my virtues. I find no com- 
fort in the notion of average, for I wish to love 
even more than to be beloved, and am so haunted 
by the conscience of my many failings that I 
find an unmixed pleasure in esteeming and ad- 
miring, but, as the recipient of esteem or admi- 
ration, I feel as a man, whose good dispositions 
are still alive, feels in the enjoyment of a dar- 
ling property on a doubtful title. My instincts 
are so far dog-like that I love beings superior 
to myself better than my equals. But the 
notion of inferiority is so painful to me that 
I never, in common life, feel a man my inferior 
except by after-reflection. What seems vanity 
in me is in great part attributable to this feeling. 
But of this hereafter. I will cross-examine my- 
self. 



ACAu- There are actions which left undone mark 

po^^TEmxT tlie greater man; but to have done them does 
not imply a bad or mean man. Such, for in- 
stance, are Martial's compliments of Domitian. 
So may we praise Milton without condemning 
Dryden. By the bye, we are all too apt to forget 
that contemporaries have not the same wholeness 
134 



ANIMA POET.E 

and fixedness in their notions of persons' char- 
acters that we their posterity have. They can 
hoj)e and fear and believe and dishelleve. We 
make up an ideal which, like the fox or lion in 
the fable, never changes. 

I have several times seen the stiletto and the foe the 

, e .1 1 . " SOOTHER 

rosary come out ot the same pocket. in ab- 



sence 



A man who marries for love is like a frog who 
leaps into a well. He has plenty of water, but 



then he cannot get out. 



[Not until national ruin is imminent will Min- 
isters contemplate the approach of national dan- 
ger] ; as if Judgment were overwhelmed like 
Belgic towns in the sea, and showed its towers 
only at dead-low water. 

The superiority of the genus to the particular 
may be illustrated by music. How infinitely 
more perfect in passion and its transition than 
even poetry, and poetry again than painting! 
And yet how marvellous is genius in all its 
implements ! 

[Compare TaUe Talk, July 6, 1833, H. N. 
C, footnote. Bell & Co., 1884, p. 240.] 

Those only who feel no originality, no con- 
sciousness of having received their thoughts 
and opinions from immediate inspiration, are 
anxious to be thought original. The certainty, 
the feeling, that he is right is enough for the 
man of genius, and he rejoices to find his opin- 
135 



ANIMA POET^ 

ions plumed and winged with tlie authority of 
several forefathers. 

The water-lily, in the midst of the lake, is 
equally refreshed by the rain, as the sponge 
on the sandy seashore. 



In the next world the souls of dull good men 
^ serve for bodies to the souls of the Shaksperes 
and Miltons, and in the course of a few centu- 
ries, when the soul can do without its vehicle, 
the bodies will by advantage of good company 
have refined themselves into souls fit to be 
clothed with like bodies. 

How much better it would be, in the House of 
Commons, to have everything that is, and by the 
spirit of English freedom must be legal, legal 
and open ! The reporting, for instance, should 
be done by shorthandists appointed by Govern- 
ment. There are, I see, weighty argimients 
on the other side, but are they not to be got 
over ? 

Co-arctation is not a bad phrase for that nar- 
rowing in of breadth on both sides, as in my in- 
terpolation of Schiller. 

" And soon 
The narrowing line of daylight that ran after 
The closing door was gone." 

Piccolomini, ii. sc. 4, P. W., p. 257. 

In order not to be baffled by the infinite ascent 
of the heavenly angels, the devil feigned that all 
136 



ANIMA POET^ 

(the TayaOov, that is, God himself included) sprang the devil 
from nothing. And now he has a pretty task to mLiory 
multiply, without j)aper or slate, the exact num- s^^br**^^ 
ber of all the animalcules, and the eggs and 
embryos of each planet by some other, and the 
product by a third, and that product by a fourth ; 
and he is not to stop till he has gone through 
the planets of half the universe, the number of 
which being infinite, it is considered by the 
devils in general a great puzzle. A dream in a 
doze. 



OF RIGHT- 
EOUSNESS 



A bodily substance, an unborrowed Self — the sun 
God in God immanent ! The Eternal Word ! — 
that goes forth yet remains ! Crescent and Full 
and Wane, yet ever entire and one, it dawns, and 
sets, and crowns the height of heaven. At the 
same time, the dawning and setting sun, at the 
same time the zodiac — while each, in its own 
hour, boasts and beholds the exclusive Presence, 
a peculiar Orb, each the great Traveller's inn, 
yet still the unmoving Sun — 

Great genial Agent in all finite souls ; 
And by that action puts on finiteness, 
Absolute Infinite, whose dazzling robe 
Flows in rich folds, and plays in shooting hues 
Of infinite finiteness. 



I was standing gazing at the starry heaven, for the 
and said, " I will go to bed, the next star that in ab-"*^^ 
shoots." Observe this, in counting fixed num- gi^^c^ " 

_ ' ^ " Syracuse, 

bers previous to doing anything, and deduce Septem- 
from man's own unconscious acknowledgment 
man's dependence on something more apparently 
137 



ANIMA POET^ 

and belie vecUy subject to regular and certain 
laws tban bis own will and reason. 

To Wordswortb in tbe progression of spirit, 
once Simonides, or Empedocles, or both in one — 

" Ob ! tbat my spirit, purged by death of its 
weaknesses, which are, alas ! my identity, might 
flow into thine, and live and act in thee and be 
thine ! " 

Death, first of all, eats of the Tree of Life and 
becomes immortal. Describe the frightful meta- 
morphosis. He weds the Hamadryad of the 
Tree [and begets a twy-form] progeny. This in 
the manner of Dante. 

Sad, drooping children of a wretched parent 
are those yellowing leaflets of a broken twig, 
broke ere its June. 

We are not inert in the grave. St. Paul's 
corn in the ground proves this scripturally, and 
the growth of infants in their sleep by natural 
analogy. What, then, if our spiritual growth be 
in proportion to the length and depth of the 
sleep ! With what mysterious grandeur does 
not this thought invest the grave, and how poor 
compared with this an immediate Paradise ! 

I awake - and find my beloved asleep, gaze 
upon her by the taper that feebly illumines the 
darkness, then fall asleep by her side ; and we 
both awake together for good and all in the 
broad daylight of heaven. 
138 



ANIMA POET^ 

Forget not to impress as often and as man- 
ifoldly as possible the totus in omni parte of 
Truth, and its consequent interdependence on co- 
operation, and, vice versa, the fragmentary char- 
acter of action, and its absolute dependence on 
society, a majority, etc. The blindness to this 
distinction creates fanaticism on one side, alarm 
and prosecution on the other. Jacobins or soul- 
gougers. It is an interesting fact or fable that 
the stork (the emblem of filial or conjugal piety) 
never abides in a monarchy. 

Commend me to the Irish architect who took 
out the foundation stone to repair the roof. 

Knox and the other reformers were Scopce via- 
rum — that is, highway besoms. 

The Pine-Tree blasted at the top was applied 
by Swift to himself as a prophetic emblem of his 
own decay. The Chestnut is a fine shady tree, 
and its wood excellent, were it not that it dies 
away at the heart first. Alas ! poor me ! 

Modern poetry is characterized by the poets' taste 
anxiety to be always striking. There is the ethical 
same march in the Greek and Latin poets, quality 
Claudian, who had powers to have been anything 
— observe in him this anxious, craving vanity ! 
Every line, nay, every word, stops, looks full in 
your face, and asks and hegs for praise ! As in 
a Chinese painting, there are no distances, no 
perspective, but all is in the foreground ; and 
this is nothing but vanity. I am pleased to 
think that, when a mere stripling, I had formed 
139 



FOR 

POETIC 

LICENSE 



ANIMA POET^ 

the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that 
bad writing was bad feeling. 

A PLEA The desire of carrying things to a greater 

height of pleasure and admiration than, omnibus 
trutinatis, they are susceptible of is one great 
cause of the corruption of poetry. Both to un- 
derstand my own reasoning and to communicate 
it, ponder on Catullus' hexameters and penta- 
meters, his " numine abusum homines " [Car- 
men Ixxvi. 4], [and similar harsh expressions]. 
It is not whether or no the very same ideas, ex- 
pressed with the very same force and the very 
same naturalness and simplicity in the versifi- 
cation of Ovid and TibuUus, would not be still 
more delightful (though even that, for any num- 
ber of poems, may well admit a doubt) ; but 
whether it is possible so to express them, and 
whether, in every attempt, the result has not been 
to substitute manner for matter, and point that 
will not bear reflection (so fine that it breaks 
the moment you try it) for genuine sense and 
true feeling, and, lastly, to confine both the sub- 
jects, thoughts, and even words of poetry within 
a most beggarly cordon. N. B. The same 
criticisni applies to Metastasio, and, in Pope, to 
his quaintness, perversion, unnatural metaphors, 
and, still more, the cold-blooded use, for artifice 
or connection, of language justifiable only by en- 
thusiasm and passion. 



RICHARD- 
SON 



I confess that it has cost, and still costs, my 

philosophy some exertion not to be vexed that 

I must admire, ay, greatly admire, Richardson. 

His mind is so very vile a mind, so oozy, hypo- 

140 



ANIMA POET^ 

critical praise-mad, canting, envious, concupis- 
cent ! But to understand and draw him would 
be to produce a work almost equal to his own • 
and, m order to do this, " down, proud Heart, 
down (as we teach little children to sav to 
themselves, bless them !), all hatred down r and 
instead thereof, charity, calmness, a heart fixed 
on the good part, though the understandino- is 
sui;veymg all. Eichardson felt truly the defect 
ot ^leldmg, or what was not his excellence, and 
made that his c?e/ec^ - a trick of uncharitable- 
ness often played, though not exclusively, by 
contemporaries. Fielding's talent was observa- 
tion, not meditation. But Richardson was not 
philosopher enough to know the difference — 
say, rather, to understand and develop it. 

O there are some natures which under the 
most cheerless, aU-threatening, nothing-promising ,,,,,, 
circumstances can draw hope from the invisible '-^^^^ 
as the tropical trees that, in the sandy desola- 
tion, produce their own lidded vessels full of the 
waters from air and dew! Alas! to my root 
not a drop trickles down but from the water- 
mg-pot of immediate friends. And, even so it 
seems much more a sympathy with their feeling 
rather than hope of my own. So should I feel 
sorrow, if Allston's mother, whom I have never 
seen, were to die ? 

Stoddart passes over a poem as one of those minhte 
tmiest ot tmy night-flies runs over a leaf, casting ^«"'"sm 
Its shadow, three times as long as itself, yet only 
just shading one, or at most two letters at a 
time. 

141 



HIS NEED 
OF EX- 



ANIMA POET^ 

A maid servant of Mrs. Clarkson's parents 
had a great desire to hear Dr. Price, and accord- 
ingly attended his congregation. On her return, 
being asked, " Well, what do you think? " etc., 
"Ai — i," replied she, "there was neither the 
poor nor the Gospel." Excellent that on the 
fine respectahle attendants of Unitarian chapels, 
and the moonshine, heartless headwork of the 
sermons. 



A DOCU- 
MENT 
HUMAIN 



The mahogany tables, all, but especially the 
large dining-table, [marked] with the segments 
of circles (deep according to the passion of the 
dice-box plunger), chiefly half-circles. O the 
anger and spite with which many have been 
thrown ! It is truly a written history of the 
fiendish passion of gambling. Oct. 12, 1806, 
Newmarket. 



The odes of Pindar (with few exceptions, and 
these chiefly in the shorter ones) seem by inten- 
tion to die away by soft gradations into a lan- 
guid interest, like most of the landscapes of the 
great elder painters. Modern ode-writers have 
commonly preferred a continued rising of in- 
terest. 



"ONE 
MUSIC AS 
BEFORE, 
BUT 
VASTER " 



The shattering of long and deep-rooted asso- 
ciations always places the mind in an angry 
state, and even when our own understandings 
have effected the revolution, it still holds good, 
only we apply the feeling to and against our 
former faith and those who still hold it — [a 
tendency] shown in modern infidels. Great 
good, therefore, of such revolution as alters, not 
142 



ANIMA POET^ 

by exclusion, but by an enlargement that in- 
cludes the former, though it places in it a new 
point of view. 

After the formation of a new acquaintance, to 
found, by some weeks' or months' unintermitted 
communion, worthy of all our esteem, affection, 
and, perhaps, admiration, an intervening ab- 
sence, whether we meet again or only write, 
raises it into friendship, and encourages the 
modesty of our nature, impelling us to assume 
the language and express all the feelings of an 
established attachment. 



ALLSTON 



The thinking disease is that in which the morbid 
feelings, instead of embodying themselves in j^^^"" 
acts^ ascend and become materials of general rea- 
soning and intellectual pride. The dreadful con- 
sequences of this perversion [may be] instanced 
in Germany, e.^., in Fichte versus Kant, 
Schelling versus Fichte, and in Verbidigno 
[Wordsworth] versus S. T. C. Ascent where 
nature meant descent, and thus shortenins: the 
process, viz., feelings made the subjects and 
tangible substance of thought, instead of actions, 
realizations, things done, and as such exter- 
nalized and remembered. On such meagre diet 
as feelings, evaporated embryos in their progress 
to hirth^ no moral being ever becomes healthy. 

Empires, states, etc., may be beautifully "phan- 
illustrated by a large clump of coal placed on a su^lim! 
fire, — Russia, for instance, — or of small coaP^^ " 
moistened, and, by the first action of the heat of 
any government not absolutely lawless, formed 
143 



ANIMA POETiE 

into a cake, as the northern nations under 
Charlemagne — then a slight impulse from the 
fall of accident, or the hand of patriotic fore- 
sight, splits [the one] into many, and makes 
each [fragment] burn with its own flame, till at 
length all burning equally, it becomes again one 
by universal similar action — then burns low, 
cinerizes, and without accession of rude materials 
goes out. 

A MILD Winter, slumbering soft, seemed to smile at 

wiNTEK yjsions of buds and blooms, and dreamt so live- 
lily of spring, that his stern visage had relaxed 
and softened itself into a dim likeness of his 
dream. The soul of the vision breathed through 
and lay like light upon his face. 

But, heavens! what an outrageous day of 
winter this is and has been ! Terrible weather 
for the last two months, but this is horrible ! 
Thunder and lightning, floods of rain, and vol- 
leys of hail, with such frantic winds. December, 
1806. 

[This note was written when S. T. C. was 
staying with Wordsworth at the Hall Farm, 
Coleorton.] 



MOON- In the first [entrance to the wood] the spots 

GLEAMS of moonlight of the wildest outlines, not unfre- 

^^^ quently approaching so near to the shape of man 

GLORIES and the domestic animals most attached to him 

as to be easily confused with them by fancy and 

mistaken by terror, moved and started as the 

wind stirred the branches, so that it almost 

seemed like a flight of recent spirits, sylphs 

and sylphids dancing and capering in a world of 

144 



ANIMA POET^ 

shadows. Once, when our path was over-cano- 
pied by the meeting boughs, as I halloed to those 
a stone-throw behind me, a sudden flash of light 
dashed down, as it were, upon the path close be- 
fore me, with such rapid and indescribable effect 
that my life seemed snatched away from me, 
not by terror, but by the whole attention being 
suddenly and unexpectedly seized hold of. If 
one could conceive a violent blow given by an 
unseen hand, yet without pain or local sense of 
injury, of the weight falling here or there, it 
might assist in conceiving the feeling. This I 
found was occasioned by some very large bird, 
who, scared by my noise, had suddenly flown up- 
ward, and by the spring of his feet or body had 
driven down the branch on which he was aperch. 
145 



CHAPTEE V. 

SEPTEMBER, 1806-DECEMBEB, 1807. 

Alas ! for some abiding-place of love, 

O'er which my spirit, like the mother dOTe, 

Might brood with warning wings ! 

S. T. C. 



DKEAMs I HAD a confused shadow rather than an image 
in my recollection, like that from a thin cloud, as 
if the idea were descending, though stiU in some 
measureless height. 



AND 
SHADOWS 



^O' 



As when the taper's white cone of flame is 
seen double, till the eye moving brings them into 
one space and then they become one — so did 
the idea in my imagination coadunate with your 
present form soon after I first gazed upon you. 

And in life's noisiest hour 

There whispers still the ceaseless love of thee, 

The heart's self-solace and soliloquy. 

You mould my hopes, you fashion me within, 
And to the leading love-throb in my heart 
Through all my being, all my pulses beat. 
You lie in all my many thoughts like light, 
Like the fair light of dawn, or summer light. 
On rippling stream, or cloud-reflecting lake — 
And looking to the Heaven that beams above 

you. 
How do I bless the lot that made me love you I 
146 



^J 



LEDGE 
AND UN- 
DER- 
STANDING 



ANIMA POET^ 

In all processes of the understanding the know- 
shortest way will be discovered the last ; and this, 
perhaps, while it constitutes the great advantage 
of having a teacher to put us on the shortest road 
at the first, yet sometimes occasions a difficulty 
in the comprehension, inasmuch as the longest 
way is more near to the existing state of the 
mind, nearer to what if left to myself, on start- 
ing the thought, I should have thought next. 
The shortest way gives me the knowledge best, 
but the longest makes me more knowing. 



AND RENE- 



When a party man talks as if he hated his partisans 
country, saddens at her prosperous events, exults 
in her disasters, and yet, all the while, is merely 
hating the ojDposite party, and would himself 
feel and talk as a patriot were he in a foreign 
land \}ie is a party man]. The true monster 
is he (and such alas ! there are in these mon- 
strous days, " voUendeter Siindhaftigkeit "), who 
abuses his coimtry when out of his country. 



Oh the profanation of the sacred word the populace 
Peoinle 1 Every brutal Burdett-led mob, as- people 
sembled on some drunken St. Monday of faction, 
is the People forsooth, and each leprous raga- 
muffin, like a circle in geometry, is, at once, one 
and all, and calls its own brutal self, " us the 
People." And who are the friends of the Peo- 
ple ? Not those who would wish to elevate each 
of them, or, at least, the child who is to take his 
place in the flux of life and death, into something 
worthy of esteem and capable of freedom, but 
those who flatter and infuriate them, as they are. 
A contradiction in the very thought ! For if, 
147 



ANIMA POET^ 



really, they are good and wise, virtuous and 
well-informed, how weak must be the motives of 
discontent to a truly moral being ; but if the 
contrary, and the motives for discontent propor- 
tionably strong, how without guilt and absurdity 
appeal to them as judges and arbiters ? He 
alone is entitled to a share in the government of all 
who has learnt to govern himself. There is but 
one possible ground of a right of freedom — viz., 
to understand and revere its duties. 

[ Vide Life of S. T. C, by James GiUman, 
1838, p. 223.] 



FOR THE How villainously these metallic pencils have 
iNAB- degenerated, not only in the length and quan- 
tity, but, what is far worse, in the quality of the 
metal ! This one appears to have no superiority 
over the worst sort sold by the Maltese shop- 
keepers. 



SENCE " 

May 28, 

1807, 

Bristol 



Blue sky through the glimmering interspaces 
of the dark elms at twilight rendered a lovely 
deep yellow-green — all the rest a delicate blue. 

The hay-field in the close hard by the farm- 
house — babe, and totterer little more [than a 
babe] — old cat with her eyes blinking in the 
sun, and little kittens leaping and frisking over 
the hay-lines. 



What an admirable subject for an Allston 
would Tycho Brahe be, listening with religious 
awe to the oracular gabble of the idiot, whom he 
kept at his feet, and used to feed with his own 
hands ! 

148 



ANIMA POET^ 

The sunflower ought to be cultivated, the 
leaves being excellent fodder, the flowers emi- 
nently melliferous, and the seeds a capital food 
for poultry, none nourishing quicker or occasion- 
ing them to lay more eggs. 

Serpentium allapsus timet. Quaere — allapse 
of serpents. Horace. — What other word have 
we ? Pity that we dare not Saxonize as boldly 
as our forefathers, by unfortunate preference, Lat- 
inized. Then we should have ongiide, angleiten ; 
onlook, anschauen^ etc. 

I moisten the bread of affliction with the 
water of adversity. 

If kings are gods on earth, they are, however, 
gods of earth. 

Parisatis poisoned one side of the knife with 
which he carved, and ate of the same joint the 
next slice unhurt — a happy illustration of af- 
fected self-inclusion in accusation. 

It is possible to conceive a planet without any 
general atmosphere, but in which each living 
body has its peculiar atmosphere. To hear and 
understand, one man joins his atmosphere to 
that of another, and, according to the sympathies 
of their nature, the aberrations of sound will 
be greater or less, and their thoughts more or 
less intelligible. A pretty allegory might be 
made of this. 

Two faces, each of a confused countenance. 
149 



ANIMA POETiE 

In the eyes of the one, mudcliness and lustre 
were blended ; and the eyes of the other were the 
same, but in them there was a red fever that made 
them appear more fierce. And yet, methought, 
the former struck a greater trouble, a fear and 
distress of the mind ; and sometimes all the face 
looked meek and mild, but the eye was ever the 
same. 

[Qu. S. T. C. and De Quincey?] 

Shadow — its being subsists in shaped and 
definite nonentity. 

Plain sense, measure, clearness, dignity, grace 
over all — these made the genius of Greece. 

Heu ! quam miserum ab illo Isedi, de quo non 
possis queri ! Eheu ! quam miserrimum est ab 
illo laedi, de quo propter amorem non possis 
queri ! 

Observation from Bacon after reading Mr. 
Sheridan's speech on Ireland : " Things will 
have their first or second agitation ; if they be 
not tossed on the arguments of council, they will 
be tossed on the W9,ves of fortune." 

The death of an immortal has been beautifully 
compared to an Indian fig, which at its full 
height declines its branches to the earth, and 
there takes root again. 

The blast rises and falls, and trembles at its 
height. 

150 



ANIMA POET^ 



A passionate woman may be likened to a wet 
candle spitting flame. 



TO LOVE. 



It is a duty, nay, it is a religion to that power 
to show that, though it makes all things — 
wealth, pleasure, ambition — worthless, yea, noi- 
some for themselves, yet for itself it can produce 
all efforts, even if only to secure its name from 
scoffs as the child and parent of slothfulness. 
Works, therefore, of general profit — works of 
abstruse thought [will be born of love] ; activity, 
and, above all, virtue and chastity [will come 
forth from his presence]. 

The moulting peacock, with only two of his 
long tail-feathers remaining, and those sadly in 
tatters, yet, proudly as ever, spreads out his 
ruined fan in the sun and breeze. 

Yesterday I saw seven or eight water-wagtails 
following a feeding horse in the pasture, flutter- 
ing about and hopping close by his hoofs, under 
his belly, and even so as often to tickle his nos- 
trils with their pert tails. The horse shortens 
the grass and they get the insects. 

Sic accipite, sic credite, ut mereamini intel- 
ligere : fides enim debet praecedere intellectum, 
ut sit intellectus fidei praemium. 

S. August. Sermones De Verb. Dom. 

Yet should a friend think foully of that 
wherein the pride of thy spirit's purity is in 
shrine. 

151 



ANIMA POET^ 

O the agony ! the agony ! 
Nor Time nor varying Fate, 
Nor tender Memory, old or late. 
Nor all his Virtues, great though they be, 
Nor all his Genius can free 
His friend's soul from the agony ! 
[So receive, so believe [divine ideas] that ye 
may earn the right to understand them. For 
faith should go before understanding, in order 
that understanding may be the reward of faith.] 

"0 re lv9ov(TLa(Tjxo<; eTrivevcrtv rtva 6eiav ex*"' SoKct 
KOLL Tw fji.avTLK<Z yeVct 7rXt](ndt,uv. — Straoo GcogrCi- 
phicus. 

Though Genius, like the fire on the altar, can 
only be kindled from heaven, yet it will perish 
unless supplied with appropriate fuel to feed it ; 
or if it meet not with the virtues whose society 
alone can reconcile it to earth, it will return 
whence it came, or, at least, lie hid as beneath 
embers, till some sudden and awakening gust of 
regenerating Grace, dva^wTrvpet, rekindles and re- 
veals it anew. 

[Now the inspiration of genius seems to bear 
the stamp of Divine assent, and to attain to 
something of prophetic strain.] 

FALLINGS I trust you are very happy in your domestic 
VANISH- ' being — very ; because, alas ! I know that to 
a man of sensibility, and more emphatically if 
he be a literary man, there is no medium be- 
tween that and " the secret pang that eats away 
the heart." . . . Hence, even In dreams of sleep, 
the soul never ^s, because it either cannot or dare 
not be any one thing, but lives in approaches 
152 



INGS 



ANIMA POET^ 

touched by the outgoing preexistent ghosts of 
many feelings. It feels forever, as a blind man 
with his protruded staff, dimly through the me- 
dium of the instrument by which it pushes off, 
and in the act of repulsion — (O for the elo- 
quence of Shakspere, who alone could feel and 
yet know how to embody those conceptions with 
as curious a felicity as the thoughts are subtle !) 
— as if the finger which I saw with eyes had, 
as it were, another finger, invisible, touching me 
with a ghostly touch, even while I feared the real 
touch from it. What if, in certain cases, touch 
acted by itself, co-present with vision, yet not 
coalescing? Then I should see the finger as at 
a distance, and yet feel a finger touching which 
was nothing but it, and yet was not it. The two 
senses cannot co-exist without a sense of causa- 
tion. The touch must be the effect of that 
finger [which] I see, and yet it is not yet near 
to me, and therefore it is not it, and yet it is it. 
Why it is is in an imaginary pre-duplication ! 

N. B. There is a passage in the second part 
of Wallenstein expressing, not explaining, the 
same feeling. " The spirits of great events stride 
on before the events ; " it is in one of the last 
two or three scenes : — 

" As the sun, 
Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image 
In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits 
Of great events stride on before the events." 
[Wallenstein, Part II., Act v., Se. 1, P. W., 1895, p. 351.] 

It is worth noting and endeavoring to detect the 
the Law of the Mind, by which, in writing ear- logy of 
nestly while we are thinking, we omit words er|oks^^ 
necessary to the sense. It will be found, I 
153 



ANIMA POET^ 

guess, that we seldom omit the material word, 
but generally the word by which the mind ex- 
presses its modification of the verhum materiale. 
Thus, on page 152, fifth line from bottom, me- 
dium is the materiale: that was its own brute, 
inert sense — but the no is the mind's action, its 
use of the word. 

I think tliis a hint of some value. Thus, the 
is a word in constant combination with the 
passive or material words ; but to is an act of 
the mind, and I had written the detect instead 
of to detect. Again, when my sense demanded 
" the " to express a distinct modification of some 
verhum materiale, I remember to have often 
omitted it in writing. The principle is evident : 
the mind borrows the materia from without, and 
passive with regard to it as the mere subject is 
" stoff " — a simple event of memory takes place ; 
but having the other in itself, the inward Having, 
with its sense of security, passes for the outward 
Having — or is all memory an anxious act, and 
thereby suspended by vivid security ? or are both 
reasons the same? or if not, are they consis- 
tent, and capable of being co- or sub-ordinated ? 
It will be lucky if some day, after having writ- 
ten on for two or three sheets rapidly and as a 
first copy, without correctign, I should by chance 
glance on this note, not having thought at all 
about it during or before the time of writing ; 
and then to examine every word omitted. 

BiBLio- To spend half an hour in Cuthill's shop, ex- 

amining Stephen's Thesaurus, in order to form 
an accurate idea of its utilities above Scapula, 
and to examine the Budceo-Tusan Constantine^ 
154 



LOGICAL 
MEMO- 
RANDA 



ANIMA POET^ 

whether it be the same or as good as Constan- 
tine, and the comparative merits of Constantine 
with Scapula. 

3. To examine Bosc relatively to Brunch, and 
to see after the new German Anthologia. 

4. Before I quit town, to buy Appendix (either 
No. 1430 or 1431), 8s. or 18s. What a differ- 
ence ! ten shillings, because the latter, the Parma 
Anacreon is on large paper, green morocco ; the 
former is neat in red morocco, but the type 
the same. 

5. To have a long morning's ramble with De 
Quincey, first to Egerton's and then to the 
book haunts. 

6. To see if I can find that Arrian with 
Epictetus which I admired so much at Mr. 
Leckie's. 

7. To find out D'Orville's Daphnis^ and the 
price. Is there no other edition ? no cheap Ger- 
man? 

8. To write out the passage from Strada's 
Prolusions at Cuthill's. 

9. Aristotle's Works, and to hunt for Proclus. 

10. In case of my speedy death, it woidd an- 
swer to buy a .£100 worth of carefully chosen 
books, in order to attract attention to my library 
and to give accession to the value of books by 
their co-existing with co-appurtenants — as, for 
instance, Plato, Aristotle ; Plotinus, Porphyry, 
Proclus ; Schoolmen, Interscholastic ; Bacon, 
Hobbes ; Locke, Berkeley ; Leibnitz, Spinoza ; 
Kant and the critical Fichte, and Wissen- 
schaftslehre, Schelling. [The first ed. of Rob. 
Constantin's Lexicon Grasco Lat. as published 
at Geneva in 1564. A second ed. post cor- 

155 



ANIMA POET^ 

rectiones G. Budei et J. Tusan% at Basle in 
1584.] 

TTovra Our mortal existence — what is it but a stop- 

P" page in the blood of life, a brief eddy from wind 

or concourse of currents in the ever -flowing 
ocean of pure Activity, who beholds pyramids, 
yea, Alps and Andes, giant pyramids, the work 
of fire that raiseth monuments, like a generous 
victor o'er its own conquest, the tombstones of 
a world destroyed ! Yet these, too, float adown 
the sea of Time, and melt away as mountains of 
floating ice. 



DisTiNc- Has every finite being (or only some) the 
UNION temptation to become intensely and wholly con- 
scious of its distinctness, and, as a result, to be 
betrayed into the wretchedness of division f 
Grosser natures, wholly swallowed up in selfish- 
ness, which does not rise to self-love, never even 
acquire that sense of distinctness, while, to 
others, love is the first step to reunion. It is a 
by-word that religious enthusiasm borders on 
and tends to sensuality — possibly because all 
our powers work together, and as a consequence 
of striding too vastly up the ladder of existence, 
a great round of the ladder is omitted, namely, 
love to some verschiedene Eine of our own kind. 
Then let Religion love, else will it not only par- 
take of, instead of being partaken by, and so 
coadunated with, the summit of love, but will 
necessarily include the nadir of love, that is 
appetite. Hence will it tend to dissensualize its 
nature into fantastic passions, the idolatry of 
Paphian priestesses. 

156 



DER ALL 
PHILOSO- 
PHY BE- 
GAN 



ANIMA POET^ 

Time, space, duration, action, active passion in won 
passive, activeness, passiveness, reaction, causa- 
tion, affinity — here assemble all the mysteries 
known. All is known-unknown, say, rather, 
merely known. All is unintelligible, and yet 
Locke and the stupid adorers of ih^t fetich earth- 
clod take all for granted. By the bye, in poetry, 
as well as metaphysics, that which we first meet 
with in the dawn of our mind becomes ever after 
fetich to the many at least. Blessed he who 
first sees the morning star, if not the sun, or 
purpling clouds his harbingers. Thence is fame 
desirable to a great man, and thence subversion 
of vulgar fetiches becomes a duty. 

Rest, motion ! O ye strange locks of intricate 
simplicity, who shall find the key? He shall 
throw wide open the portals of the palace of 
sensuous or symbolical truth, and the Holy of 
Holies will be found in the adyta. Rest = en- 
joyment and death. Motion := enjoyment and 
life. O the depth of the proverb, "Extremes 
meet " ! 

The " break of the morning " — and from m a 
inaction a nation starts uj) into motion and wide k^/^g of 
fellow-consciousness ! The trumpet of the Arch- '^"'^ ^^^ 
angel — and a world with all its troops and com- 
panies of generations starts up into a hundred- 
fold expansion, power multiplied into itself 
cubically by the number of all its possible acts 
— all the potential springing into power. Con- 
ceive a bliss from self-conscience, combining 
with bliss from increase of action ; the first 
dreaming, the latter dead-asleep in a grain of 
gunpowder — conceive a huge magazine of gun- 
157 



ANIMA POET^ 

powder, and a flash of lightning awakes the 
whole at once. What an image of the resur- 
rection, grand from its very inadequacy. Yet 
again, conceive the living, moving ocean — its 
bed sinks away from under, and the whole world 
of waters falls in at once on a thousand times 
vaster mass of intensest fire, and the whole prior 
orbit of the planet's successive revolutions is 
possessed by it at once QPotentia fit actus) amid 
the thunder of rapture. 

SINE Form is factitious being, and thinking is the 

QUA N N pj.Qgggg . imagination the laboratory in which 
the thought elaborates essence into existence. A 
philosopher, that is, a nominal philosopher with- 
out imagination, is a coiner. Vanity, the froth 
of the molten mass, is his stuffs and verbiage the 
stamp and impression. This is but a deaf met- 
aphor — better say that he is guilty of forgery. 
He presents the same sort of paper as the honest 
barterer, but when you carry it to the bank it is 
found to be drawn to Outis^ Esq. His words 
had deposited no forms there, payable at sight 
— or even at any imaginable time from the date 
of the draft. 



SOLVITUR 

SUSPICI- 

ENDO 



The sky, or rather say, the aether at Malta, 
with the sun apparently suspended in it, the eye 
seeming to pierce beyond and, as it were, behind 
it — and, below, the sethereal sea, so blue, so a 
zerfiossenes eins^ the substantial image, and fixed 
real reflection of the sky ! Oil could annihi- 
late in a deep moment all possibility of the nee- 
dle-point, pin's-head system of the atomists by 
one submissive gaze ! 

158 



ANIMA POET^ 

A dewdrop, the pearl of Aurora, is Indeed a a gem of 
true unio. I would that unio were the word for ^*^^^^^^ 
the dewdrop, and the pearl be called unio mari- 
nus. 

for the power to persuade all the writers of ver, zer 
Great Britain to adopt the ver^ zer^ and al of the 
German. Why not verboil, zerboil ; verrend, 
zerrend ? I should like the very words verflosseYiy 
zerflossen, to be naturalized : — 

And as I looked now feels my soul creative throes, 
And now all joy, all sense zerflows. 

1 do not know whether I am in earnest or in 
sport while I recommend this ver and zer ; that 
is, I cannot be sure whether I feel, myself, any- 
thing ridiculous in the idea, or whether the feel- 
ing that seems to imply this be not the effect of 
my anticipation of and sympathy with the ridi- 
cule of, perhaps, all my readers. 



To you there are many like me, yet to me the 

LOVI 
HUMILITY 



there is none like you, and you are always like ^°^^^ ® 



yourself. There are groves of night-flowers, yet 
the night-flower sees only the moon. 
159 



CHAPTER VI. 

1808-1809. 

Yea, oft alone, 
Piercing the long-neglected holy cave 
The haunt obscure of old Philosophy, 
He bade, with lifted torch, its starry walls 
Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame 
Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage. 

S. T. C. 

INOPENE If one thought leads to another, so often does it 
FEcrr*"'^ blot out another. This I find when having lain 
musing on my sofa, a number of interesting 
thoughts having suggested themselves, I conquer 
my bodily indolence, and rise to record them in 
these books, alas ! my only confidants. The first 
thought leads me on indeed to new ones ; but 
nothing but the faint memory of having had 
these remains of the other, which had been even 
more interesting to me. I do not know whether 
this be an idiosyncrasy, a peculiar disease, of my 
particular memory, but so it is with me, — my 
thousrhts crowd each other to death. 



TRAL 
PRONOUN 



A NEu- Quaere — whether we may not, nay ought not, 

to use a neutral pronoun relative, or representa- 
tive, to the word " Person," where it hath been 
used in the sense of homo, mensch, or noun of 
the common gender, in order to avoid particular- 
izing man or woman, or in order to express either 
sex indifferently ? If this be incorrect in syntax, 
the whole use of the word Person is lost in a 
number of instances, or only retained by some 
160 



PLAINT OF 
THE LOVER 



ANIMA POET^ 

stifP and strange position of words, as, " not 
letting the person be aware, loherein offence has 
heen given,''^ instead of, " wherein he or she 
has offended." In my [judgment] both the 
specific intention and general etymon of " Per- 
son " in such sentences fully authorize the use of 
it and which instead of he, she, him, her, who, 
whom. 

If love be the genial sun of human nature, un- the 
kindly has he divided his rays [in acting] on me com 
and my beloved ! On her hath he poured all his 
light and splendor, and my being doth he per- 
meate with his invisible rays of heat alone. She 
shines and is cold like the tx'opic firefly; I, 
dark and uncomely, would better resemble the 
cricket in hot ashes. My soul, at least, might be 
considered as a cricket eradiating the heat which, 
gradually cinerizing the heart, produces the em- 
bers and ashes from among which it chirps out 
of its hiding-place. 

N. B. This put in simple and elegant verse, 
[would pass] as an imitation of Marini, and of 
too large a part of the madrigals of Guarini him- 
self. 

Truth per se is like unto quicksilver, bright, truth 
agile, harmless. Swallow a pound and it will 
run through unaltered, and only, perhaps, by its 
weight force down impurities from out the sys- 
tem. But mix and comminute it by the mineral 
acid of spite and bigotry, and even truth becomes 
a deadly poison — medicinal only when some 
other, yet deadlier, lurks in the bones. 
161 



INEFFA- 
BLE 



ANIMA POET^E 

LOVE THE O ! many, many are the seeings, hearings of 
pure love that have a being of their own, and to 
call them by the names of things unsouled and 
debased below even their lowest nature by associa- 
tions accidental, and of vicious accidents, is hlas- 
pTiemy. What seest thou yonder? The lovely 
countenance of a lovely maiden, fervid yet awe- 
suffering with devotion — her face resigned to 
bliss or bale ; or a hit of flesh ; or rather, that 
which cannot be seen unless by him whose very 
seeing is more than an act of mere sight — that 
which refuses all words, because words being, 
perforce, generalities do not awake, but really 
involve associations of other words as well as 
other thoughts — but that which I see must be 
felt, be possessed, in and by its sole self ! What ! 
shall the statuary Pygmalion of necessity feel 
this for every part of the insensate marble, and 
shall the lover Pygmalion, in contemplating the 
living statue, the heart-adored maiden, breathing 
forth in every look, every movement, the genial 
life imbreathed of God, grovel in the mire and 
grunt the language of the swinish slaves of the 
Circe, of vidgar generality and still more vulgar 
association ? The Polyclete that created the 
Aphrodite KaWiirvyo^ thought in acts, not words 
— energy divinely languageless — 8ta rov Aoyov, 
ov a-vv €7r£o-i, through the Word, not with loords. 
And what though it met with Imp-fathers and 
Imp-mothers and Fiendsips at its christening in 
its parents' absence ! 



THE MAN- One of the causes of superstition, and also of 
enthusiasm, and, indeed, of all errors in matters 
of fact, is the great power with which the effect 
162 



UFACTURE 
OF PRO 
PHECY 



ANIMA POET^ 

acts upon and modifies the remembrance of its 
cause, at times even transforming it in the mind. 
Let A have said a few words to B, which (by- 
some change and accommodation of them to the 
event in the mind of B) have been remarkably ful- 
filled ; and let B remind A of these words which 
he (A} had spoken, A will instantly forget all 
his mood, motive, and meaning, at the time of 
speaking them, nay, remember words he had 
never spoken, and throw back upon them, from 
the immediate event, an imagined fulfilment, a 
prophetic grandeur — himself, in his own faith, 
a seer of no small inspiration. We yet want 
the growth of a prophet and self-deceived won- 
der-worker stej) by step, through all the stages ; 
and, yet, what amjjle materials exist for a true 
and nobly-minded psychologist ! For, in order 
to make fit use of these materials, he must love 
and honor as well as understand human nature 
— rather, he must love in order to understand it. 

O that sweet bird ! where is it ? It is encaged the cap- 
somewhere out of sight; but from my bedroom M^yig'^'^ 
at the Courier office, from the wiudows of ^^^^ 
which I look out on the walls of the Lyceum, I 
hear it at early dawn, often, alas! lulling me 
to late sleep — again when I awake and all day- 
long. It is in prison, all its instincts ungratified, 
yet it feels the influence of spring, and calls 
with unceasing melody to the Loves that dwell 
in field and greenwood bowers, unconscious, per- 
haps, that it calls in vain. O are they the songs 
of a happy, enduring day-dream ? Has the bird 
hope ? or does it abandon itself to the joy of its 
163 



ANIMA POET^ 

frame, a living harp of Eolus ? O that I could 
do so ! 

Assuredly a thrush or blackbird encaged in 
Loudon is a far less shocking spectacle, its en- 
cagement a more venial defect of just feeling, 
than (which yet one so often sees) a bird in a 
gay cage in the heart of the country, — yea, as if 
at once to mock both the poor prisoner and its 
kind mother, Nature, — in a cage hung up in a 
tree, where the free birds after a while, when 
the gaudy dungeon is no longer a scare, crowd 
to it, perch on the wires, drink the water, and 
peck up the seeds. But of all birds, I most 
detest to see the nightingale encaged, and the 
swallow, and the cuckoo. Motiveless ! monstrous ! 
But the robin ! O woes' woe ! woe ! — he, sweet 
cock-my-head-and-eye, pert-bashful darling, that 
makes our kitchen its chosen cage. 



ARCHI- 
TECTURE 
AND 
CLIMATE 



If we take into consideration the effect of the 
climates of the North, Gothic, in contradistinc- 
tion to Greek and Grseco-Roman, architecture 
is rightly so named. Take, for instance, a rainy, 
windy day, or sleet, or a fall of snow, or an 
icicle-hanging frost, and then compare the total 
effect of the South European roundnesses and 
smooth perpendicular surface with the ever- 
varying angles and meeting-lines of the North 
European or Gothic styles. 

[The above is probably a dropped sentence 
from the report of the First or Second Lec- 
ture of the 1818 series. See Coleridge s Works, 
Harper and Brothers, 1853, iv. 232-239.] 
164 



ANIMA POET^ 

The demagogues address the lower orders as nkither 
if they were negroes — as if each individual free ^ 
were an inseparable part of the order, always to 
remain, nolens volens, poor and ignorant. How 
different from Christianity, which forever calls 
on us to detach ourselves spiritually, not merely 
from our rank, but even from our body, and 
from the whole world of sense ! 

The one mighty, main defect of female educa- the 
tion is that everything is taught but reason and pri'mek ^ 
the means of retaining affection. This — this 
— O ! it is worth all the rest told ten thousand 
times, — how to greet a husband, how to re- 
ceive him, how never to recriminate — in short, 
the power of pleasurable thoughts and feelings, 
and the mischief of giving pain, or (as often 
happens when a husband comes home from a 
party of old friends, joyous and full of heart) 
the love-killing effect of cold, dry, uninterested 
looks and manners. 

Let me record the following important remark the hai,f- 
of Stuart, with whom I never converse but to house 
receive some distinct and rememberable improve- Wednes- 

T day night, 

ment Cand if it be not remembered, it is the May 28, 

1808 

defect of my memory — which, alas ! grows 
weaker daily — or a fault from my indolence in 
not noting it down, as I do this), that there is 
a period in a man's life, varying in various men, 
from thirty-five to forty-five, and operating 
most strongly in bachelors, widowers, or those 
worst and miserablest widowers, unhappy hus- 
bands, in which a man finds himself at the to^j 
of the hill, and having attained, perhaps, what 
165 



ANIMA POET^ 

he wislies, begins to ask himself, What is all 
this for ? — begins to feel the vanity of his pur- 
suits, becomes half melancholy, gives in to wild 
dissipation or self -regardless drinking ; and some, 
not content with these (not slow) poisons, destroy 
themselves, and leave their ingenious female or 
female-minded friends to fish out some motive 
for an act which proceeded from a motive-makifig 
impulse, which would have acted even without a 
motive (even as a terror ^ in nightmare is a 
bodily sensation, and though it most often calls 
up consonant images, yet, as I know by experi- 
ence, can take effect equally without any) ; or, 
if not so, yet like gunjoowder in a smithy, though 
it will not go off without a spark, is sure to 
receive one, if not this hour, yet the next. I 
had felt this truth, but never saw it before 
clearly : it came upon me at Malta under the 
melancholy, dreadful feeling of finding myself 
to be man, by a distinct division from boyhood, 
youth, and " young man." Dreadful was the 
feeling — till then life had flown so that I had 
always been a boy, as it were ; and this sensa- 
tion had blended in all my conduct, my willing 
acknowledgment of superiority, and, in truth, 
my meeting every person as a superior at the first 
moment. Yet if men survive this period, they 

1 [0 heaven, 't was frightful ! now run down and stared at 

By shapes more ugly than can be remembered — 

Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing, 

But only being afraid — stifled with Fear ! 

And every goodly, each familiar form 

Had a strange somewhat that breathed terrors on me ! 
(From my MS. tragedy [S. T. C] ) Remorse, iv. 7G8-774 ; but 
the passage is omitted from Osorio, Act iv. 53 sq., P. W., pp. 
386-499.] 

166 



ANIMA POET^ 

commonly become cheerful again. That is a 
comfort for mankind, not for me / 

My inner mind does not justify the thought his own 
that I possess a genius, my strength is so very ^^^^"® 
small in proportion to my power. I believe that 
I first, from internal feeling, made or gave light 
and impulse to this important distinction be- 
tween strength and power, the oak and the 
tropic annual, or biennial, which grows nearly 
as high and spreads as large as the oak, but in 
which the wood^ the heart, is wanting — the vital 
works vehemently, but the immortal is not with 
it. And yet, I think, I must have some analogue 
of genius ; because, among other things, when I 
am in company with Mr. Sharp, Sir J. Mackin- 
tosh, R. and Sydney Smith, Mr. Scarlett, etc., 
etc., I feel like a child, nay, rather like an inhab- 
itant of another planet. Their very faces all act 
upon me, sometimes, as if they were ghosts, but 
more often as if I were a ghost among them — 
at all times as if we were not consubstantial. 

" The class that ought to be kept separate name it 
from all others " — and this said by one of break it 
themselves ! O what a confession that it is no 
longer separated ! Who would have said this 
even fifty years ago ? It is the howling of ice 
during a thaw. When there is any just reason 
for saying this, it ought not to be said, it is al- 
ready too late. And though it may receive the 
assent of the people of " the squares and places," 
yet what does that do, if it be the ridicule of all 
other classes ? 

167 



GER OF 
OVER- 
BLAMING 



ANIMA POETiE 

THE DAN- The general experience, or rather sujDposed 
experience, prevails over the particular know- 
ledge. So many causes oppose man to man, 
that he hegins by thinldng of other men worse 
than they deserve, and receives his punishment 
by at last thinking worse of himself than the 
truth is. 

EXCESS OF Expressions of honest self-esteem, in which 
ESTEEM 8^\f was only a diagram of the genus, will excite 
sympathy at the minute, and yet, even among 
persons who love and esteem you, be remembered 
and quoted as ludicrous instances of strange self- 
involution. 



DEFECT Those who think lowliest of themselves, per- 

ESTEE^i' haps with a feeling stronger than rational com- 
^08 "^' parison would justify, are apt to feel and express 
undue asperity for the faults and defects of those 
whom they habitually have looked up to as to 
their superiors. For placing themselves very 
low, perhaps too low, wherever a series of ex- 
periences, struggled against for a while, have 
at length convinced the mind that in such and 
such a moral habit the long-idolized superior is 
far below even itself, the grief and anger will 
be in proportion. " If even / could never have 
done this, O anguish, that Tie, so much my supe- 
rior, should do it ! If even / with all my infirmi- 
ties have not this defect, this selfishness, that he 
should have it ! " This is the course of thought. 
Men are bad enough ; and yet they often think 
themselves worse than they are, among other 
causes by a reaction from their own uncharitable 
168 



ANIMA POET^ 

thoughts. The poisoned chalice is brought back 
to our own lips. 

He was grown, and solid from his infancy, a practi- 
like that most useful of domesticated animals, 
that never runs but with some prudent motive 
to the mast or the wash-tub, and, at no time a 
slave to the present moment, never even grmits 
over the acorns before him without a scheming 
squint, and the segment, at least, of its wise little 
eye cast toward those on one side, which his 
neighbor is or may be about to enjoy. 

Quaere, whether the high and mighty Edin- lucus a 
burghers, etc., have not been elevated into guar- lucendo 
dians and overseers of taste and poetry for much 
the same reason as St. Cecilia was chosen as the 
guardian goddess of music, because, forsooth, so 
far from being able to compose or play herself, 
she could never endure any other instrument 
than the jew's-harp or Scotch bagpipe ? No I 
too eager recensent! you are mistaken, there is 
no anachronism in this. We are informed by 
various antique bas-reliefs that the bagpipe was 
well known to the Romans, and probably, there- 
fore, that the Picts and Scots were even then 
fond of seeking their fortune in other coun- 
tries. 

"Love is the spirit of life, and music the life love and- 

C r\ • ', 5? MUSIC 

01 the spn-it. 

Q. What is music? A. Poetry in its grand 
sense ! Passion and order at once ! Imperative 
power in obedience ! 

Q. What is the first and divinest strain of 
169 



ITY 



ANIMA POETiE 

music? A. In the intellect: "Be able to will 
that thy maxims (rules of individual conduct) 
should be the law of all intelligent being ! " 

In the heai't, or practical reason, " Do unto 
others as thou wouldst be done by." This in 
the widest extent involves the test, "Love thy 
neighbor as thyself, and God above all things." 
For, conceive thy being to be all-including, that 
is, God — thou knowest that thou wouldest com- 
mand thyself to be beloved above all things. 

[For the motto at the head of this note see the 
lines " Ad Vilmum Axiologum," P. TF., 1893, 
p. 138.] 



From what reasons do I believe in continuous 
and ever-continuable consciousness ? From con- 



CON- 
SCIENCE 
AND IM- 
MORTAL- science ! Not for myself, but for my conscience, 
that is, my affections and duties towards others, 
I should have no self — for self is definition, but 
all boundary implies neighborhood, and is know- 
able only by neighborhood or relations. Does 
the understanding say nothing in favor of im- 
mortality ? It says nothing for or against ; but 
its silence gives consent, and is better than a 
thousand arguments such as mere understanding 
could afford. But miracles ! " Do you speak 
of them as proofs or as natural consequences of 
revelation, whose presence is proof only by pre- 
cluding the disproof that would arise from their 
absence ? " " Nay, I speak of them as of posi- 
tive fundamental proofs." Then I dare answer 
you, " Miracles in that sense are blasphemies in 
morality, contradictions in reason. God the 
Truth, the actuality of logic, the very logos — 
He deceive his creatures and demonstrate the 
170 



% 



ANIMA POET^ 

properties of a triangle by the confusion of all 
properties ! If a miracle merely means an event 
before inexperienced, it proves only itself, and 
the inexperience of mankind. Whatever other 
definition be given of it, or rather attempted 
(for no other not involving direct contradiction 
can be given), it is blasphemy. It calls dark- 
ness light, and makes Ignorance the mother of 
Malignity, the appointed nurse of religion — 
which is knowledge as opposed to mere calculat- 
ing and conjectural understanding. Seven years 
ago — but oh ! in what happier times — I wrote 
thus — 

O ye hopes ! that stir within me ! 

Health come with you from ahove I 
God is with me ! God is in me ! 

I cannot die ; for life is love ! 

And now, that I am alone and utterly hopeless 
for myself, yet still I love ; and more strongly 
than ever feel that conscience or the duty of 
love is the proof of continuing, as it is the cause 
and condition of existing consciousness. How 
beautiful the harmony ! Whence could the 
proof come, so appropriately, so conformly with 
all nature, in which the cause and condition of 
each thing is its revealing and infallible pro- 
phecy ! 

And for what reason, say, rather, for what 
cause, do you believe immortality? Because I 
oughts therefore I must ! 

[The lines " On revisiting the Seashore," of 
which the last stanza is quoted, were written in 
August, 1801. [P. TT., 1853, p. 159.] If the 
note was written exactly seven years after the 
date of that poem, it must belong to the summer 
171 



ANIMA POET^ 

of 1808, when Coleridge was living over the 
Courier office in the Strand.] 

THE CAP Truly, I hope not irreverently, may we apply 
LIBERTY to the French nation the Scripture text, " From 
him that hath nothing shall be taken that which 
he hath " — that is, their pretences to being free, 
which are the same as nothing. They, the 
illuminators, the discoverers and sole possessors 
of the true philosoj)her's stone ! Alas ! it proved 
both for them and Europe the Lapis Infer- 
nalis. 

VAIN- Lord of light and fire ? What is the universal 

of man in all, but especially in savage states ? 
Fantastic ornament and, in general, the most 
frightful deformities — slits in the ears and nose, 
for instance. What is the solution ? Man will 
not be a mere thing of nature : he will be 
and show himself a power of himself. Hence 
these violent disruptions of himself from all 
other creatures! What they are made, that 
they remain, — they are Nature's, and wholly 
Nature's. 



CHILDREN Try to contemplate mankind as children. 

LARGER These we love tenderly, because they are beauti- 
ful and happy ; we know that a sweetmeat or a 
top will transfer their little love for a moment, 
and that we shall be repelled with a grimace. 
Yet we are not offended. 



GROWTH 



cHYMicAL I am persuaded that the chymical technology, 
as far as it was borrowed from life and intelli- 
gence, half metaphorically, half mystically, may 
172 



ANALO 
GIES 



ANIMA POET^ 

be brought back again (as when a man borrows 
of another a sum which the latter had previously 
borrowed of him, because he is too polite to 
remind him of a debt) to the use of psychology 
in many instances, and, above all, [may be re- 
adapted to] the philosophy of language, which 
ought to be exj)erimentative and analytic of the 
elements of meaning — their double, triple, and 
quadrujjle combinations, of simple aggregation 
or of composition by balance of opposition. 

Thus innocence is distinguished from virtue, 
and vice versa. In both of them there is a 
positive, but in each opposite. A decomposition 
must take place in the first instance, and then 
a new composition, in order for innocence to 
become virtue. It loses a positive, and then 
the base attracts another different positive, by 
the higher affinity of the same base under a 
different temperature for the latter. 

I stated the legal use of the innocent as op- 
posed to mere 7iot guilty (he was not only 
acquitted, but was proved innocent), only to 
show the existence of a positive in the former — 
by no means as confounding this use of the word 
with the moral pleasurable feeling connected 
with it when used of little children, maidens, and 
those who in mature age preserve this sweet fra- 
grance of vernal life, this mother's gift and so- 
seldom-kept keepsake to her child, as she sends 
him forth into the world. The distinction is 
obvious. Law agnizes actions alone, and charac- 
ter only as presumptive or illustrative of partic- 
ular action as to its guilt or non-guilt, or to the 
commission or non-commission. But our moral 
feelings are never pleasurably excited except as 
173 



ANIMA POET^ 

they refer to a state of being ; and the most 
glorious actions do not delight us as separate 
acts, or rather facts, but as representatives of 
the being of the agent, — mental stenographs 
which bring an indeterminate extension within 
the field of easy and simultaneous vision, — dif- 
fused being rendered visible by condensation. 
Only for the hero's sake do we exult in the heroic 
act, or, rather, the act abstracted from the hero 
would no longer appear to us heroic. Not, there- 
fore, solely from the advantage of poets and histo- 
rians do the deeds of ancient Greece and Rome 
strike us into admiration, while we relate the very 
same deeds of barbarians as matters of curiosity, 
but because in the former we refer the deed to the 
individual exaltation of the agent, in the latter 
only to the physical result of a given state of so- 
ciety. Compare the heroism of the Swiss patriot, 
with bis bundle of spears turned towards his 
breast, in order to break the Austrian pikemen, 
and that of the Mameluke, related to me by Sir 
Alexander Ball, who, when his horse refused to 
plunge in on the French line, turned round and 
hacked it on them, with a certainty of death, in 
order to effect the same purpose. In the former, 
the state of mind arose from reason, morals, 
liberty, the sense of the duty owing to the inde- 
pendence of his country, and its continuing in a 
state compatible with the highest perfection and 
development; while the latter was predicative 
only of mere animal habit, ferocity, and unrea- 
soned antipathy to strangers of a different dress 
and religion. 

If, contrary to my expectations, — alas ! al- 
174 



ANIMA POET^ 

most, I fear, to my wishes, — I should live, it is books in 
my intention to make a catalogue of the Greek ^"^ ^^^ 
and Latin Classics, and of those who, like the 
author of the Argenis [William Barclay, 1546- 
1605], and Euphorniio, Fracastorius, Flaminius, 
etc., deserve that name though moderns — and 
every year to apply all my book-money to the grad- 
ual completion of the collection, and buy no other 
books except German, if the Continent should be 
opened again, excej)t Massinger, Beaumont and 
Fletcher, and Jonson. The two last I have, I be- 
lieve, but imperfect — indeed, B. and F. worth- 
less, the best plays omitted. It would be a 
pleasing employment, had I health, to translate 
the Hymns of Homer, with a disquisitional 
attempt to settle the question concerning the 
personality of Homer. Such a thing in two vol- 
umes, well done^ by philosophical notes on the 
mythology of the Greeks, distinguishing the sa- 
cerdotal from the poetical, and both from the 
philosophical or allegorical, fairly grown into 
two octavos, might go a good way, if not all the 
way, to the Bipontine Latin and Greek Classics. 



I almost fear that the alteration would excite a turtle 
surprise and uneasy contempt in Verbidigno's house-*"^' 
mind (towards one less loved, at least) ; but had "'^^^ "^^^ 
I written the sweet tale of the " Blind Highland 
Boy," I would have substituted for the washing- 
tub, and the awkward stanza in which it is speci- 
fied, the images suggested in the following lines 
from Dampier's Travels, vol. i. pp. 105, 106 : " I 
heard of a monstrous green turtle once taken at 
the Port Royal, in the Bay of Campeachy, that 
was four feet deep from the back to the belly, 
175 



ANIMA POETiE 

and the belly six feet broad. Captain Rock's 
son, of about nine or ten years of age, went in it, 
as in a boat, on board liis father's ship, about a 
quarter of a mile from the shore." And a few 
lines before : " The green turtle are so called 
because their shell is greener than any other. 
It is very thin and clear, and better clouded than 
the Hawksbill, but 't is used only for inlays^ 
being extraordinary thin." Why might not 
some mariners have left this shell on the shore 
of Loch Leven for a while, about to have trans- 
ported it inland for a curiosity, and the blind 
boy have found it ? Would not the incident be 
in equal keeping with that of the child, as well as 
the image and tone of romantic uncommonness ? 

[ " In deference to the opinion of a friend," 
this substitution took place. A promise made to 
Sara Coleridge to re-instate the washing-tub was, 
alas ! never fulfilled. See Poetical Worhs of 
W. Wordsworth, 1859, pp. 197, and 200 foot- 
note.'] 

THE Tremendous as a Mexican god is a strong 

sense of duty — separate from an enlarged and 
discriminating mind, and gigantically dispropor- 
tionate to the size of the understanding ; and 
if combined with obstinacy of self-opinion and 
indocility, it is the parent of tyranny, a pro- 
moter of inquisitorial persecution in public life, 
and of inconceivable misery in private families. 
Nay, the very virtue of the person, and the con- 
sciousness that it is sacrificing its own happi- 
ness, increases the obduracy, and selects those 
whom it best loves for its objects. Eoque im- 
176 



TENDER 
MERCIES 
OF THE 
GOOD 



THE 
FKIEND 



ANIMA POET^ 

mitior quia ipse tolerat (not toleraveraf) is its 
inspiration and watchword. 

A nation of reformers looks like a scourer of hints fok 
silver-plate — black all over and dingy, with 
making things white and brilliant. 

A joint combination of authors leagued to- 
gether to declaim for or against liberty may be 
compared to Buffon's collection of smooth mirrors 
in a vast fan arranged to form one focus. May 
there not be gmipowder as well as corn set before 
it, and the latter will not thrive, but become 
cinders ? 

A good conscience and hope combined are like 
fine weather that reconciles travel with delight. 

Great exploits, and the thirst of honor which 
they inspire, enlarge states by enlarging hearts. 

The rejection of the love of glory without the 
admission of Christianity is, truly, human dark- 
ness lacking human light. 

Heaven preserve me from the modern epidemic 
of a proud ignorance ! 

Hypocrisy, the deadly crime which, like Judas, 
kisses Hell at the lijss of Redemption. 

Is 't then a mystery so great, what God, and 
the man, and the world is ? No, but we hate to 
hear ! Hence a mystery it remains. 
177 



I.NG BKLLS 



ANIMA POET^ 

The massy misery so prettily hidden with the 
gold and silver leaf — hracteata felicitas. 

^^NCERN- If I have leisure, I may, perhaps, write a wild 
rhyme on the Bell^ from the mine to the belfry, 
and take for my motto and Chapter of Contents, 
the two distichs, but especially the latter, — 

Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum : 
Defunetos ploro, pestem fugo, festa decoro. 
Funera plang'o, f uigura frango, sabbata pango : 
Excito lentos, dissipo veutos, paco cruentos. 

The wagon-horse celsa cervice eminens clarum- 
que jactans tintinnabulum. Item, the cattle on 
the river, and valley of dark pines and firs in the 
Hartz. 

The army of Clotharius besieging Sens were 
frightened away by the bells of St. Stephen's, 
rung by the contrivance of Lupus, Bishop of 
Orleans. 

For ringing the largest bell, as a Passing-bell, 
a high price was wont to be paid, because being 
heard afar it both kept the evil spirits at a greater 
distance, and gave the chance of the greater num- 
ber of prayers pro mortuo^ from the pious who 
heard it. 

Names of saints were given to bells that it 
might appear the voice of the Saint himself call- 
ing to prayer. Man will humanize all things. 

[It is strange that Coleridge should make no 
mention of Schiller's " Song of the Bell," of 

178 



ANIMA POET^ 

wliicli he must, at any rate, have heard the title. 
Possibly the idea remained though its source was 
forgotten. The Latin distichs were introduced 
by Longfellow in his " Golden Legend." 

Of the cow-bells in the Hartz he gives the fol- 
lowing account in an unpublished letter to his 
wife: April-May, 1799. "But low down in 
the valley and in little companies on each bank 
of the river a multitude of green conical fii'-trees, 
with herds of cattle wandering about, almost 
every one with a cylindrical bell around its neck, 
of no inconsiderable size. And as they moved, 
scattered over the narrow vale, and up among 
the trees of the hill, the noise was like that of a 
great city in the stillness of the Sabbath morn- 
ing, where all the steeples, all at once, are ringing 
for Church. The whole was a melancholy scene 
and quite new to me."] 

179 



CHAPTER Vn. 



1810. 



A PIOUS 
ASPIRA- 
TION 



O dare I accuse 
My earthly lot as guilty of my spleen, 
Or call my destiny niggard ! O no ! no I 
It is her largeness, and her overflow, 
Which being incomplete, disquieteth me so ! 



S. T. C. 



My own faculties, cloudy as they may be, will 
be a sufficient direction to me in plain daylight, 
but my friend's wish shall be the pillar of fire to 
guide me darkling in my nightly march through 
the wilderness. 



THOUGHT 
AND AT- 
TENTION 



Thought and attention are very different 
things. I never expected the former (viz., 
selbst-thatige Erzeugung dessen, wovon meine 
Rede war^ from the readers of The Friend. I 
did expect the latter, and was disappointed. 
Jan. 3, 1810. 

This is a most important distinction, and in the 
new light afforded by it to my mind, I see more 
plainly why mathematics cannot be a substitute 
for logic, much less for metaphysics, that is, tran- 
scendental logic, and why, therefore, Cambridge 
has produced so few men of genius and original 
power since the time of Newton. Not only it 
does not call forth the balancing and discriminat- 
ing power [that I saw long ago], but it requires 
only attention., not thought or self-production. 

" The man who squares his conscience by the 
180 



ANIMA POETiE 

law," was, formerly, a phrase for a prudent vil- law and 
lain, an unprincipled coward. At present the 
law takes in everything — the things most incon- 
gruous with its nature, as the moral motive, and 
even the feelings of sensibility resulting from ac- 
cidents of cultivation, novel-reading, for instance. 
If, therefore, at all times the law would be found 
to have a much greater influence on the actions 
of men than men generally suppose, or the agents 
were themselves conscious of, this influence we 
must expect to find augmented at the present 
time in proportion to the encroachments of the law 
on religion, the moral sense, and the sympathies 
engendered by artificial rank. Examine this 
and begin, for instance, with reviews, and so on 
through the common legal immoralities of life, in 
the pursuits and pleasures of the higher half of 
the middle classes of society in Great Britain. 

" Hence (i. e., from servile and thrall-like catholic 
fear) men came to scan the Scriptures by the 
letter and in the covenant of our redemption 
magnified the external signs more than the 
quickening power of the Spirit." — Milton's 
Hevieio of Church Government^ vol. i. p. 2. 

It were not an unpleasing fancy, nor one 
wholly unworthy of a serious and charitable 
Christianity, to derive a shadow of hope for the 
conversion and purification of the Roman Apos- 
tasy from the conduct and character of St. Peter 
as shadowing out the history of the Latin Church, 
whose ruling pastor calls himself the successor 
of that saint. Thus, by proud humility^ he 
hazarded the loss of his heavenly portion in ob- 
jecting to Christ's taking upon himself a lowly 
181 



ANIMA POETiE 

office and character of a servant (hence the 
pomps and vanities with which Rome has 
tricked out her bishops, etc.), the eager drawing 
of the fleshly sword in defence of Christ; the 
denying of Christ at the cross (in the apostasy) ; 
but, finally, his bitter repentance at the third 
crowing of the cock (perhaps Wickliffe and Huss 
the first, Luther the second, and the third yet to 
come — or, perhaps Wickliffe and Luther the 
first, the second may be the present state of 
humiliation, and the third yet to come). After 
this her eyes will be opened to the heavenly 
vision of the universal acceptance of Christ of 
all good men of all sects, that is, that faith is a 
moral, not an intellectual act. 

THE IDEAL Ou somc dcHghtful day in early spring some 
of my countrymen hallow the anniversary of 
their marriage, and with love and fear go over 
the reckoning of the past and the unknown 
future. Tlie wife tells with half-renewed mod- 
esty all the sweet feelings that she disguised and 
cherished in the courting-time ; the man looks 
with a tear full in his eye and blesses the hour 
when for the first time (and oh! let it be the 
last) he spake deep and solemn to a beloved 
being: "Thou art mine and I am thine, and 
henceforward I shield and shelter [thee] against 
the world, and thy sorrows shall be my sorrows, 
and though abandoned by all men, we two will 
abide together in love and duty." 

In the holy eloquent solitude where the very 

stars that twinkle seem to be a voice that silits 

the dream, a voice of a dream, a voice soundless 

and yet for the ear not the eye of the soul, when 

182 



MARKIAGE 



ANIMA POET^ 

the winged soul passes over vale and mountain, 
sinks into glens, and then climbs with the cloud, 
and passes from cloud to cloud, and thence from 
sun to sun — never is she alone. Always one, 
the dearest, accompanies, and even when he 
melts, diffused in the blue sky, she melts at 
the same moment into union with the beloved. 

That our religious faiths, by the instincts a super- 
which lead us to metaphysical investigation, entity 
are founded in a practical necessity, not a 
mere intellectual craving after knowledge, and 
systematic conjecture, is evinced by the interest 
which all men take in the questions of future 
existence, and the being of God ; while even 
among those who are speculative by profession 
a few phantasts only have troubled themselves 
with the questions of preexistence, or with 
attempts to demonstrate the jiosse and esse of a 
devil. But in the latter case more is involved. 
Concerning preexistence men in general have 
neither care nor belief ; but a devil is taken for 
granted, and, if we might trust words, with the 
same faith as a Deity, " He neither believes 
God or devil." And yet, while we are delighted 
in hearing proofs of the one, we never think of 
asking a simple question concerning the other. 
This, too, originates in a practical source. The 
Deity is not a mere solution of difficulties con- 
cerning origination, but a truth which spreads 
light and joy and hope and certitude through all 
things — while a devil is a mere solution of an 
enigma, an assumption to silence our uneasiness. 
That end answered (and most easily are such 
183 



ANIMA POET^ 

ends answered), we have no further concern 
with it. 

PSYCHO- The great change — that in youth and early 
manhood we psychologize and with enthusiasm 
but all out of ourselves, and so far ourselves 
only as we descry therein some general law. 
Our own self is but the diagram, the triangle 
which represents all triangles. Afterward we 
psychologize out of others, and so far as they 
differ from ourselves — O how hollowly ! 



LOGY IN 
YOUTH 
AND 
MATURITY 



FARE- 
WELL ! 



HAIL AND We have been for many years at a great dis- 
tance from each other, but that may happen with 
no real breach of friendship. All intervening 
nature is the continuum of two good and wise 
men. We are now separated. You have com- 
bined arsenic with your gold, Sir Humphry ! 
You are brittle, and I will rather dine with 
Duke Humphry than with you. 



ANEC 
DOTE 



A GENUINE Sara Coleridge saj^s, on telling me of the uni- 
versal sneeze produced on the lasses while shak- 
ing my carpet, that she wishes my snuff would 
grow, as I sow it so plentifully ! 

[This points to the summer of 1810, the five 
months spent at Greta Hall previous to the 
departure south with Basil Montagu.] 



RELIGION 



SPIRITUAL A thing cannot be one and three at the same 
time ! True ! but time does not apply to God. 
He is neither one in time nor three in time, for 
he ejfists not in time at all — the Eternal ! 

The tridy religious man, when he is not con- 
veying his feelings and beliefs to other men, and 
184 



ANIMA POET^ 

does not need the medium of words — O ! liow 
little does he find in his religious sense either of 
form or of number — it is infinite I Alas ! why 
do we aU seek by instinct for a God, a supersensual, 
but because we feel the insufficiency, the unsub- 
stantiality of all /brms, and formal being for it- 
self. And shall we explain a by x, and then x 
by a — give a soul to the body, and then a body 
to the soul — ergo^ a body to the body — feel the 
weakness of the weak, and call in the stz'ength- 
ener, and then make the very weakness the sub- 
stratum of the strength ? This h. worse than 
the poor Indian ! Even he does not make the 
tortoise support the elephant, and yet put the 
elephant under the tortoise ! 

But we are too social, we becon;3 in a sort 
idolaters, for the means we are obliged to use 
to excite notions of truth in the miufb of others 
we by witchcraft of slothful association impose on 
ourselves for the truths themselves. Our intel- 
lectual bank stops payment, and we pass an act 
by acclamation that hereafter the pa} :er promises 
shall be the gold and silver itself, and ridicule 
a man for a dreamer and reviver of antiquated 
dreams who believes that gold and .silver exist. 
This may do as well in the market, I nit O ! for 
the universal, for the man himself, the difference 
is woeful. 

The immense difference between b^Iug glad to truth 
find Truth it^ and to find it Truth ! O ! I am 
ashamed of those who praise me ! For I know 
that as soon as I tell them my mind on another 
subject, they will shrink and abhor me. For not 
because I enforced a truth were they pleased in 
185 



ANIMA POET^ 

the first instance, but because I had supported a 
favorite notion of theirs which they loved for its 
and their sake, and therefore woukl be glad to 
find it true — not that loving- Truth they loved 
this oj)inion as one of its forms and consequences. 
The root ! the root must be attacked ! 

A TIME TO Among the evils that attend a conscientious 
author who writes in a corrupt age is the ne- 
cessity he is under of exposing himself even to 
pi? 'alible charges of envy, mortified vanity, and, 
above all, of self-conceit before those whose bad 
passions would make even the most improbable 
charges plausible. 

What can he do ? Tell the truth, and the 
whole truth plainly, and with the natural affec- 
tion which it inspires, and keeping off (difficult 
task !) all scorn (for to suppress resentment is 
easy), let him trust the bread to the waters in 
the firm faith that wisdom shall be justified by 
her childrea. Vanity ! self-conceit ! What van- 
ity ? what self-conceit ? What say I more than 
this ? Ye who think and feel the same will love 
and esteem me by the law of sympathy, and 
value me according to the comparative effect I 
have made on your intellectual powers, in en- 
abling you better to defend before others, or more 
clearly to onlooh (anscJiauen^ in yourselves the 
truths to \7hich your noblest being bears witness. 
The rest I leave to the judgment of posterity, 
utterly unconcerned whether my name be attached 
to these opinions or (niy writings forgotten) 
another man's. 

But what can I say, when I have declared my 
abhorrence of the Edinhurgh Review f In vain 
186 



ANIMA POETiE 

should I tell my critics that were I placed on the 
rack I could not remember ten lines of my own 
poems, and that on seeing my own name in their 
abuse, I regard it only as a symbol of Words- 
worth and Southey, and that I am well aware that 
from utter disregard and oblivion of anything 
and all things which they can know of me by 
experience, my name is mentioned only because 
they have heard that I was Wordsworth's and 
Southey's friend. 

The brightest luminaries of earth give names hints fok 
to the dusky spots in the selenograpay of Hel- friend " 
vetius. 

The intrepidity of a pure conscience and a 
simple principle [may be] compared to a life- 
boat, and somewhat in the detail, stemming with 
a little rudder the tumbling ruins of tke sea, 
rebounding from the rocks and shelves in ?ury. 

Duns Scotus affirms that the certainty of 
faith is the greatest certainty — a dark speech 
which is explained and proved by the de))end- 
ence of the theoretic powers on the practi- 
cal. But Aristotle admits that demonstrated 
truths are inferior in kind of certainty to the 
indemonstrable out of which the former art de- 
duced. 

Faithful, confident reliance on man and on God 
is the last and hardest virtue ! And wherefore ? 
Because we must first have earned a faith 
in ourselves. Let the conscience pronounce : 
" Trust in thyself ! " Let the whole heart be 
187 



ANIMA POET^ 

able to say, " I trust in myself," and those 
whomever we love we shall rely on, in propor- 
tion to that love. 

A testy patriot might be pardoned for saying 
with Falstaff, when Dame Quickly told him 
" She came from the two parties, forsooth," 
" The Devil take one party and his Dam the 
other." John Bull has suffered more for their 
sake, more than even the supererogatory Gullibil- 
ity of his disposition is able to bear. 

Lavater fixed on the simplest physiognomy in 
his whob congregation, and pitched his sermon 
to his comprehension. Narcissus either looks at 
or thinks of his looking-glass, for the same wise 
purpose I presume. 

Reviewers resemble often the English jury 
and Tie Italian conclave: they are incapable of 
eating till they have condemned or craned. 

The Pope [may be compared to] an old lark, 
who, tiiough he leaves off soaring and singing in 
the height, yet has his spurs grow longer and 
sharper the older he grows. 

Let us not, because the foliage waves in neces- 
sary obedience to every breeze, fancy that the 
tret shakes also. Though the slender branch 
bend, one moment to the east and another to 
the west, its motion is circumscribed by its con- 
nection with the unyielding trunk. 

My first cries mingled with my mother's 
188 



ANIMA POETiE 

death-groan, and she beheld the vision of glory, a hint 
ere I the earthly sun. When I first looked up to " chris- 
Heaven consciously, it was to look up after, or ^abel " 
for, my mother. 

The two sweet silences — first in the purpling "all 
dawn of love-troth, when the heart of each ripens III pa"^^' 
in the other's loolcs within the unburst calyx, sio^'S; all 

•^ ' DE- 

and fear becomes so sweet that it seems but a lights " 
fear of losing hope in certainty; the second, 
when the sun is setting in the calm eve of confi- 
dent love, and [the lovers] in mute recollection 
enjoy each other. " I fear to speak, I fear to 
hear you speak, so deeply do I now enjoy your 
presence, so totally possess you in myself, my- 
self in you. The very sound would break the 
union and separate you-me into you and me. 
We both, and this sweet room, its books, its fur- 
niture, and the shadows on the wall slumbering 
with the low, quiet fire, are all our thought, one 
harmonious imagery of forms distinct on the still 
substance of one deep feeling, love, and joy — a 
lake, or, if a stream, yet flowing so softly, so 
unwrinkled, that its flow is life, not change — 
that state in which all the individuous nature, 
the distinction without division of a vivid thought, 
is united with the sense and substance of intens- 
est reality." 

And what if joy pass quick away ? Long 
is the track of Hope before — long, too, the track 
of recollection after, as in the Polar spring the 
sun [is seen in the heavens] sixteen days before 
it reaUy rises, and in the Polar autumn ten days 
after it has set ; so Nature, with Hope and Rec- 
ollection, pieces out our short summer. 
189 



ANIMA POET^ 



WORDS N. B. In my intended essay in defence of 

punning (Apology for Paronomasy, alias pun- 
ning), to defend those turns of words — 



AND 
THINGS 



Che 1' onda chiara, 
E 1' ombra non men cara — 

in certain styles of writing, by proving that 
language itself is formed upon associations of 
this kind ; that possibly the sensus genericus of 
whole classes of words may be thus deciijhered 
(as has indeed been attempted by Mr. White, of 
Clare Hall) ; that words are not mere symbols 
of things and thoughts, but themselves things,, 
and that any harmony in the things symbolized 
will perforce be presented to us more easily, as 
well as with additional beauty, by a correspond- 
ent harmony of the symbols with each other. 
Thus heri vidi fragilem frang'i^ hodie morta- 
lem mori ; gestern seh ich was gebrechliches 
brechen, heute was sterbliches sterben, com- 
pared with the English. This the beauty of 
homogeneous languages. So Few^, vidi, vici. 

[This note follows an essay on Giambattista 
Strozzi's Madrigals, together with a transcrip- 
tion of twenty-seven specimens. The substance 
of the essay is embodied in the text of Chapter 
xvi. of the Biograjjhia Literaria, and a long 
footnote. The quotation is from the first madri- 
gal, quoted in the note, which is not included 
in those transcribed in Notebook 17. — Cole- 
ridge's Works, iii. (Harper & Brothers, 1853), 
pp. 388-393.] 

AssociA- Important suggestion on 4th March, 1810 
(Monday nighty. The law of association clearly 
190 



TION 



ANIMA POET^ 

begins in common causality. How continued but 
by a causative jjower in the soul ? What a 
proof of causation and power from the very law 
of mind, and cluster of facts adduced by Hume 
to overthrow it ! 

It is proud ignorance that, as a disease of the corol- 
mind, alone superinduces the necessity of the 
medium of metaphysical philosophy. The errors 
into which a sound, unaffected mind is led by 
the nature of things (Things as the substratum 
of power) — no errors at all, any more than the 
motion of the sun. " So it appears " — and 
that is most true — but when pride will work 
up these phenomena into a system of things in 
themselves^ then they become most pernicious 
errors, and it is the duty of true mind to examine 
them with all the virtues of the intellect, — 
patience, humility, etc. 

" By aid of a large portion of mother's wit, mother 
Paine, though an unlearned man, saw the ab- 
surdity of the Christian religion." Mother's 
wit, indeed ! Wit from his mother the earth — 
the earthy and material wit of the flesh and its 
lusts. One ounce of mother wit may be worth a 
pound of learning, but a grain of the Father's 
wisdom is worth a ton of mother wit — yea ! of 
both together. 

" O it is but an infant ! 't is but a child ! he of educa- 
will be better as he grows older." " O ! she '11 
grow ashamed of it. This is but waywardness." 
Grant all this — that they will o?/^grow these 
particular actions, yet with what habits of 
191 



ANIMA POET^ 

feeling will tliey arrive at youth and manhood ? 
Especially with regard to obedience, how is it 
possible that they should struggle against the 
boiling passions of youth by means of obedience 
to their own conscience who are to meet the 
dawn of conscience with the broad meridian of 
disobedience and habits of self-willedness ? Be- 
sides, when are the rebukes, the chastisements, 
to commence ? Why ! about nine or ten, perhaps, 
when, for the father at least, [the child] is less 
a plaything — when, therefore, anger is not 
healed up in its mind, either by its own infant 
versatility and forgetfulness, or by after ca- 
resses, — when everything is remembered indi- 
vidually, and sense of injustice felt. For the 
boy very well remembers the different treatment 
when he was a child ; but what has been so long 
permitted becomes a right to him. Far better, 
in such a case, to have them sent off to others — 
a strict schoolmaster — than to breed that con- 
tradiction of feeling toward the same person 
which subverts the very princijjle of our im- 
pulses. Whereas, in a tender, yet obedience- 
exacting and improvement-enforcing education, 
though very gradually, and by small doses at a 
time, yet always going on — yea ! even from a 
twelvemonth old — at six or seven the child really 
has outgrown all things that annoy, just at the 
time when, as the charm of infancy begins to 
diminish, they would begin really to annoy. 

There are, in every country, times when the 

few who know the truth have clothed it for the 

vulgar, and addressed the vulgar in the vulgar 

language and modes of conception, in order to 

192 



ANIMA POET^ 

convey any part of the truth. This, however, the 
could not be done with safety, even to the illu- of adapt- 
minati themselves in the first instance ; but to ]^^ truth 

' TO THE 

their successors habit gradually turned lie into minds of 
belief, partial and stagnate truth into ignorance, vulgar 
and the teachers of the vulgar (like the Francis- 
can friars in the South of Europe) became a 
part of the vulgar — nay, because the laymen 
were open to various imjjulses and influences, 
which their instrvictors had built out (comj)are a 
brook in ojsen air, liable to rain-streams and rills 
from new-opened fountains, to the same running 
through a mill guarded by sluice-gates and back- 
water), they became the vidgarest of the vulgar, 
till, finally, resolute not to detach themselves from 
the mob, the mob at length detaches itself from 
them, and leaves the mill-race dry, the moveless, 
rotten wheels as day-dormitories for bats and 
owls, and the old grindstones for wags and 
scoffers of the taproom to whet their wits on. 

When there are few literary men, and the vast poetry 
Tolff ^^ ^^® population are ignorant, as was 
the case of Italy from Dante to Metastasio, from 
causes I need not here 'put down, there ivill be a 
poetical language ; but that a poet ever uses a 
word as poetical — that is, formally — which he, 
in the same mood and thought, would not use in 
prose or conversation, Milton's Prose Works will 
assist us in disproving. But as soon as liter- 
ature becomes common, and critics numerous in 
any country, and a large body of men seek to 
express themselves habitually in the most pre- 
cise, sensuous, and impassioned words, the differ- 
ence as to mere words ceases, as, for example, the 
193 



ANIMA POET^ 

German prose writers. Produce to me one word 
out of Klopstock, Wieland, Schiller, Goethe, 
Voss, etc., which I will not find as frequently 
used in the most energetic prose writers. The 
sole difference in style is that poetry demands a 
severe keeping — it admits nothing that prose 
may not often admit, but it oftener rejects. In 
other words, it presupposes a more continuous 
state of passion. N. B. Provincialisms of 
poets who have become the supreme classics in 
countries one in language but under various 
states and governments have aided this false 
idea, as, in Italy, the Tuscanisms of Dante, 
Ariosto, and Alfieri, foolishly imitated by Vene- 
tians, Romans, and Neapolitans. How much 
this is against the opinion of Dante, see his ad- 
mirable treatise on " Lingua Volgare Nobile," 
the first, I believe, of his prose or prose mid 
verse works ; for the " Convito " and " La Vita 
Nuova " are one third in metre. 

WORLDLY I would strongly recommend Lloyd's " State 
Worthies" \^The Statesmen and Favorites of 
England since the Reformation. By David 
Lloyd. London, 1665-70] as the manual of 
every man who would rise in the world. In 
every twenty pages it recommends contradic- 
tions, but he who cannot reconcile them for him- 
self, and discover which suits his plan, can never 
rise in the world. N. B. I have a mind to 
draw a complete character of a worldly-wise man 
out of Lloyd. He would be highly finished, 
useful, honored, popular — a man revered by his 
children, his wife, and so forth. To be sure, he 
must not expect to be beloved by one proto- 
194 



WISE 



'THE 
FRIEND ' 



ANIMA POET^ 

friend ; and, if there be truth in reason or Chris- 
tianity, he will go to hell — but, even so, he will 
doubtless secure himself a most respectable place 
in the devil's chimney-corner. 

The falseness of that so very common opinion, hints for 
" Mathematics, ay, that is something ! that has 
been useful — but metaphysics ! " Now fairly 
compare the two, what each has really done. 

But [be thou] only concerned to find out 
truth, which, on what side soever it appears, is 
always victory to every honest mind. 

Christianity, too (as well as Platonism and 
the school of Pythagoras), has its esoteric philo- 
sophy, or why are we forbidden to cast pearls 
before swine? But who are the swine? Are 
they the poor and despised, the unalphabeted in 
worldly learning ? O, no ! the rich whose hearts 
are steeled by ignorance of misery and habits 
of receiving slavish obedience — the dropsical 
learned and the St. Vitus [bewitched] sciolist. 

In controversy it is highly useful to know 
whether you are really addressing yourself to an 
opponent or only to partisans, with the intention 
of preserving them firm. Either is well, but 
they should never be commmgled. 

In her letter to Lord Willoughby Queen Eliz- 
abeth hath the word " eloign." There is no 
exact equivalent in modern use. Neither " with- 
draw " or " absent " are precisely synonymous. 

We understand nature just as if, at a distance, 
195 



ANIMA POET^ 

we looked at the image of a person in a looking- 
glass, plainly and fervently discoursing, yet what 
he uttered we could decipher only by the motion 
of the lips or by his mien. 

I must extract and transcribe from the preface 
to the works of Paracelsus that eloquent defence 
of technical new words and of old words used in 
a new sense. The whole preface is exceedingly 
lively, and (excepting the mountebank defence 
of intentional obscurity and the attack on logic, 
as if it were ever intended to be an organon of 
discovery of material truth and directly, instead 
of a formal preliminary assisting the mind indi- 
rectly, and showing what cannot be truth, and 
what has not been proved truth) very just. 

The Chinese call' the monsoon whirlwind, 
when more than usually fierce, the elephant. 
This is a fine image — a mad, wounded war- 
elephant. 

The poor oppressed Amboynese, who bear 
with patience the extirpation of their clove and 
nutmeg trees, in their fields and native woods, 
and the cruel taxes on sugar, their staif of life, 
will yet, at once and universally, rise up in re- 
bellion and prepare to destroy in despair all and 
everything, themselves included, if any attempt 
is made to destroy any individual's Tatanaman, 
the clove-tree which each Amboynese plants at 
the birth of each of his children. Very affect- 
ing! 

The man of genius places things in a new 
196 



ANIMA POET^ 

light. This trivial phrase better expresses the 
appropriate effects of genius than Pope's cele- 
brated distich — 

" What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest." 

It has been thought distinctly, but only possessed, 
as it were, unpacked and unsorted. The poet 
not only displays what, though often seen in its 
unfolded mass, had never been opened out, but 
he likewise adds something, namely, light and re- 
lations. Who has not seen a rose, or sprig of 
jasmine or myrtle ? But behold those same flow- 
ers in a posy or flower-pot, painted by a man of 
genius, or assorted by the hand of a woman of 
fine taste and instinctive sense of beauty ? 

To find our happiness incomplete without the love 
happiness of some other given person or persons 
is the definition of affection in general, and ap- 
plies equally to friendship, to the parental and to 
the conjugal relations. But what is love ? — love 
as it may subsist between two persons of differ- 
ent senses ? This — and what more than this ? 
The mutual dependence of their happiness, each 
on that of the other, each being at once cause 
and effect. You, therefore I — I, therefore you. 
The sense of this reciprocity of well-being is 
that which first stamps and legitimates the name 
of happiness in all the other advantages and fa- 
vorable accidents of nature or fortune, without 
which they would change their essence and be- 
come like the curse of Tantalus, insulting remem- 
brances of misery, of that most unquiet of all 
miseries, means of happiness blasted and trans- 
formed by incompleteness, nay, by the loss of 
197 



ANIMA POET^ 

the sole organ through which we could enjoy 
them. 

- Suppose a wide and delightful landscape, and 
what the eye is to the light, and the light to the 
eye, that interchangeably is the lover to the be- 
loved. " O best beloved ! who lovest me the best ! " 
In strictest propriety of application might he 
thus address her, if only she with equal truth 
could echo the same sense in the same feeling. 
" Light of mine eye ! by which alone I not only 
see all I see, but which makes up more than half 
the loveliness of the objects seen, yet, still, like 
the rising sun in the morning, like the moon at 
night, remainest thyself and for thyself, the dear- 
est, fairest form of all the thousand forms that 
derive from thee all their visibility, and borrow 
from thy presence their chief est beauty ! " 



Cottle's 

" FREE 
VERSION 
OF THF, 
PSALMS " 



Diamond + oxygen = charcoal. Even so on 
the fire-spark of his zeal did Cottle place the 
King David diamonds, and caused to pass over 
them the oxygenous blast of his own insjjiration, 
and lo ! the diamond becomes a bit of charcoal. 



FRIEND- 
SHIP AND 
MARRIAGE 



" Ich finde alles eher auf der Erde, so gar 
Wahrheit und Freude, als Freundschaf t." — Jean 
Paul.i 

This for the motto — to examine and attest the 
fact, and then to explain the reason. First, 
then, there are the extraordinary qualifications de- 
manded for true friendship, arising from the mul- 
titude of causes that make men delude them- 
selves and attribute to friendship what is only a 

1 [" I find all things upon earth, even truth and joy, rather 
than friendship."] 

198 



ANIMA POET.I: 

similarity of pursuit, or even a mere dislike of 
feeling oneself alone in anything. But, secondly, 
supposing the friendship to be as real as human 
nature ordinarily permits, yet how many causes 
are at constant war against it, whether in the 
shape of violent irruptions or unobserved yet 
constant wearings away by dyspathy, etc. Ex- 
emplify this in youth and then in manhood. 
First there is the influence of wives, how fre- 
quently deadly to friendship, either by direct 
encroach, or, perhaps, intentional plans of alien- 
ation ! Secondly, there is the effect of families, 
by otherwise occupying the heart ; and, thirdly, 
the action of life in general, by the worldly-wise, 
chilling effects of prudential anxieties. 

Corollary. These reflections, however, suggest 
an argument in favor of the existing indissolubil- 
ity of marriage. 

To be comj)elled to make it up, or consent to 
be miserable and disrespected, is indeed a coarse 
plaister for the wounds of love, but so it must be 
while the patients themselves are of coarse make 
and unhealthy humors. 

His imagination, if it must be so called, is at imagina- 
all events of the pettiest kind — it is an imagin- 
unculation. How excellently the German Ein- 
hilchmgshraft expresses this prime and loftiest 
faculty, the power of co-adunation, the faculty 
that forms the many into one — in-eins-hlldung ! 
Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is contra- 
distinguished from fantasy, or the mirrorment, 
either catoptric or metoptric — repeating simply, 
or by transposition — and, again, involuntary 
[fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will. 
199 



TION 



ANIMA POET^ 



[See Biog. Lit., cap. x., Coleridge^ & Works, 
iii. 272. See also Blachioood' s Jfagazine, March, 
1840, No. cexciii., Art. " The Plagiarisms of S. T. 



Coleridge." 



PUBLIC 

OPINION 
AND THE 
SERVICES 



Ministers, as in the Admiralty, or War 
Office, compared to managers of theatres. The 
numerous absurd claims at length deaden their 
sense of judgment to real merit, and superin- 
duce in the mind an anticipation of clamorous 
vanity. Hence the great importance of the pub- 
lic voice, forcing them to be just. This, how 
illustrated by the life of Nelson — the infamous 
coldness with which all his claims were received 
— especially Mr. Wyndham's answer, July 21, 
1795. And no wonder ! for such is the state of 
moral feeling, even with the English public, that 
an instance of credulity to an ingenious scheme 
which has failed in the trial will weigh more 
heavily on a minister's character than to have 
stifled in the birth half a dozen such men as 
Nelson or Cochrane, or such schemes as that 
of a floating army. Nelson's life is a perpetual 
comment on this. 



SERMONS 
ANCIENT 
AND MOD 
EKM 



Of moral discourses and fine moral discus- 
. sions in the pulpit — " none of your Methodist 
stuff for me." And, yet, most certain it is, 
that never were either ministers or congrega- 
tions so strict in all morality as at the time 
when nothing but fine moral discourses (that is, 
calculations in self-love) would have driven a 
preacher from the pulpit — and when the clergy 
thought it their pulpit duty to preach Christ and 
Him crucified, and the why and the wherefore — 
200 



ANIMA POET^ 

and that the soberest, law-obeying, most pru- 
dent nation in the world would need Him as 
much as a nation of drunkards, thieves, and 
profligates. How was this? Why, I take it, 
those old parsons thought, very wisely, that the 
pulpit was the place for truths that applied to 
all men, humbled all alike (not mortified one or 
two, and sent the rest home, scandal-talking 
with pharisaic " I thank thee, God, I am not as 
so and so, but I was glad to hear the par- 
son "), comforted all, frightened all, offended all, 
because they were all men — that jDrivate vices 
depend so much on particular circumstances, 
that without making the pulpit a lampoon shop 
(or, even supposing the genius of him who wrote 
Isaac Jenkins, without particulars not suited to 
the pulpit) that it would be a cold generality 
affair — and that, therefore, they considered the 
pulpit as one part of their duty, but to their 
whole congregation as men^ and that the other 
part of their duty, which they thought equally 
binding on them, was to each and every member 
of that congregation as John Harris, or James 
Tomkins, in private conversation — and like that 
of Mr. Longford, sometimes to rebuke and warn, 
sometimes to comfort, sometimes and oftener to 
instruct, and render them capable of under- 
standing his sermon. In short they would 
preach as Luther, and would converse as Mr. 
Longford to Isaac Jenkins. 

[ The History of Isaac Jenkins^ " a Moral 
■Fiction^ By Thomas Beddoes, M. D., 1793]. 

With a loving, generous man whose activity 
of intellect is exerted habitually on truth and 
201 



MGHT 



ANIMA POET^ 

HEAvi- events of permanent, or, at least, general interest 
ENDURE^ still warmed and colored by benevolent enthusi- 
FORA agjji self-unconsciously, and whose heart-move- 
ments are all the property of the few, whom 
he dearly loves — with such a man, for the 
vast majority of the wrongs met with in life, 
that at all affect him, a one-night's sleep pro- 
vides the oblivion and the cure — he awakes 
from his slumbers and his resentment at the 
same moment. Yesterday is gone and the 
clouds of yesterday. The sun is born again, 
and how bright and joyous! and I am born 
again ! But O ! there may be wrongs, for which 
with our best efforts for the most perfect sup- 
pression, with the absence, nay, the impossibility 
of anger or hate, yet, longer, deeper sleep is 
required for the heart's oblivion, and thence 
renewal — even the long total sleep of death. 

To me, I dare avow, even this connects a new 
soothing with the thought of death, an addi- 
tional lustre in anticipation to the confidence of 
resurrection, that such sensations as I have so 
often had after small wrongs, trifling quarrels, 
on first awaking in a summer morn after refresh- 
ing sleep, I shall experience after death for those 
few wounds too deep and broad for the vis medi- 
catrix of mortal life to fill wholly up with new 
flesh — those that, though healed, yet left an 
unsightly scar which, too often, spite of our best 
wishes, opened anew at other derangements and 
indispositions of the mental health, even when 
they were altogether unconnected with the wound 
itself or its occasions — even as the scars of the 
sailor, the relics and remembrances of sword or 
gunshot wounds (first of all his bodily frame 
202 



ANIMA POETiE 

giving way to ungenial influences from without 
or from within), ache and throb at the coming 
in of rain or easterly winds, and open again and 
bleed anew, at the attack of fever, or injury from 
deficient or unwholesome food — that even for 
these I should enjoy the same delightful annihi- 
lation of them, as of ordinary wrongs after sleep. 

I would say to a man who reminded me of a 
friend's unkind words or deeds which I had for- 
given : Smoking is very well while we are all 
smoking, even though the head is made dizzy by 
it and the candle of reason burns red, dim, and 
thick ; but, for Heaven's sake, don't put an old 
pipe to my nose just at breakfast-time, among 
dews and flowers and sunshine. 
203 



CHAPTER VIII. 

1811-1S12. 

From all that meets or eye or ear, 
There falls a genial holy fear, 
Which, like the heavy dew of morn. 
Refreshes while it bows the heart forlorn ! 

S. T. C. 

TIME REAL How marked the contrast between troubled 
GiNARY " manhood, and joyously active youth in the sense 
of time ! To the former, time like the sun in an 
empty sky is never seen to move, but only to 
have moved. There, there it was, and now 't is 
here, now distant ! yet all a blank between. To 
the latter it is as the full moon in a fine breezy 
• October night, driving on amid clouds of all 

shapes and hues, and kindling shifting colors, 
like an ostrich in its speed, and yet seems not 
to have moved at all. This I feel to be a just 
image of time real and time as felt, in two dif- 
ferent states of being. The title of the poem, 
therefore (for poem it ought to be), should be 
time real and time felt (in the sense of time) 
in active youth, or activity with hope and ful- 
ness of aim in any period, and in despondent, 
objectless manhood — time objective and sub- 
jective. 

[The riddle is hard to read, but the under- 
lying thought seems to be that in youth the 
sense of time is like the apparent motion of the 
moon through clouds, ever driving on, but ever 
seeming to stand still ; whereas the sense of 
204 



ANIMA POET^ 

time in manhood is like the sun, which seems to 
be stationary, and yet, at short intervals, is seen 
to have moved. This is time felt in two differ- 
ent states of being. Time real is, as it were, 
sun or moon which move independently of 
our percejition of their movements. The note 
(1811), no doubt, contains the germs of " Time 
Real and Imaginary " first published in " Sibyl- 
line Leaves " in 1817, which Coleridge in his 
Preface describes as a " schoolboy poem," and 
interprets thus : " By imaginary tune I meant 
the state of a schoolboy's mind, when, on his 
return to school, he projects his being in his day- 
dreams, and lives in his next holidays, six months 
hence ! " The explanation was probably an 
afterthought. " The two lovely children " who 
" rmi an endless race " may have haunted his 
schoolboy dreams, may perhaps have returned 
to the dreams of his troubled manhood, bringing 
with them the sense rather than the memory of 
youth, intermingled with a consciousness that 
youth was gone forever, but the composition of 
the poem dates from 1811, or possibly 1815, 
when the preparation of the poems for the 
press would persuade him once more to express 
his thoughts in verse.] 

On the wide level of a mountain's head, time real 

(I knew not where, but 't was some faery 
place,) 
Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread, 
Two lovely children run an endless race, 
A sister and a brother ! 
This far outstript the other ; 
205 



AND imag- 
inary; AN 

ALLEGORY 



NIGHT 

MAKE 



ANIMA POETM 

Yet ever runs she with reverted face, 
And looks and listens for the boy behind : 

For he, alas ! is blind ! 
O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed, 
And knows not whether he be first or last. 

[P. W., 1893, p. 187. See, too. Editor's 
JVote, p. 638.] 

THE HAG Elucidation of my all-zermalming [that is, 
all-crushing] argument on the subject of ghosts, 
apparitions, etc. 

Nightmare is, I think, always, even when it 
occurs in the midst of sleep, and not as it more 
commonly does after a waking interval, a state 
not of sleep, but of stupor of the outward organs 
of sense — not in words, indeed, but yet in fact 
distinguishable from the suspended power of the 
senses in true sleep, while the volitions of rea- 
son, that is, the faculty of comparison, etc., are 
awake though disturbed. This stupor seems to 
be occasioned by some painful sensations of un- 
known locality (most often, I believe, in the 
lower bowel) which, withdrawing the attention to 
itself from the sense of other realities present, 
makes us asleep to them, indeed, but otherwise 
awake. And, whenever the derangement occa- 
sions an interruption in the circulation, aided, 
perhaps, by pressure, awkward position, etc., the 
part deadened, as the hand, the arm, or the foot 
and leg, or the side, transmits double touch as 
single touch, to which the imagination, therefore, 
the true inward creatrix, instantly out of the 
chaos of elements or shattered fragments of 
memory, puts together some form to fit it. And 
this [imagination derives an over-mastering sense 
206 



ANIMA POET^ 

of reality from the circumstance that the power 
of reason, being in good measure awake, most 
generally presents to us all the accompanying 
images very nearly as they existed the moment 
before, when we fell out of anxious wakefulness 
into this reverie. For example, the bed, the 
curtain, the room and its furniture, the know- 
ledge of who lives in the next room, and so 
forth, contribute to the illusion. ... In short, 
the nightmare is not, properly, a dream, but a 
species of reverie, akin to somnambulism, during 
which the understanding and moral sense are 
awake, though more or less confused, and over 
the terrors of which the reason can exert no in- 
fluence, because it is not true terror^ that is, 
apprehension of danger, but is itself a specific 
sensation = terror corporeus sive materialis. 
The explanation and classification of these 
strange sensations, the organic material anal- 
ogous (ideas materiales intermedias^ as the 
Cartesians say) of Fear, Hope, Rage, Shame, 
and (strangest of all) Remorse, form at present 
the most difficult, and at the same time the most 
interesting problem of psychology, and are 
intimately connected with prudential morals, the 
science, that is, of morals not as the ground and 
law of duty, but in their relation to the empiri- 
cal hindrances and focillations in the realizing 
of the law by human beings. The solution of 
this problem would, perhaps, throw great doubt 
on the present [notion] that the forms and 
feelings of sleep are always the reflections and 
confused echoes of our waking thoughts and ex- 
periences. 

207 



AND a 
MAGIC 
MIEROK 



ANIMA POET^ 

A MOMENT What a swarm of thoughts and feelings, end- 
lessly minute fragments, and, as it were, repre- 
sentations of all preceding and embryos of all 
future thought, lie compact in any one moment ! 
So, in a single drop of water, the microscope dis- 
covers what motions, what tumult, what wars, 
what pursuits, what stratagems, what a circle- 
dance of death and life, death-hunting life, and 
life renewed and invigorated by death! The 
whole world seems here in a many-meaning 
cypher. What if our existence was but that 
moment? What an unintelligible, affrightful 
riddle, what a chaos of limbs and trunk, tail- 
less, headless, nothing begun and nothing ended, 
would it not be? And yet scarcely more than 
that other moment of fifty or sixty years, were 
that our all. Each part throughout infinite 
diminution adapted to some other, and yet the 
whole a means to nothing — ends everywhere, 
and yet an end nowhere. 

[Compare the three last lines of "What is 
Life ? " 

Is very life by consciousness unbounded ? 

And all tlie thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath, 

A war-embrace of wrestling life and death ? 

P. W., 1893, p. 173.] 

The love of nature is ever returned double 
THAT IN- to us, not only the delighter in our delight, 
THE bliss' b^it ^J linking our sweetest, but of themselves 
OF SOLI- perishable feelinj^s to distinct and vivid imajjes, 

TUUE i o _ . 

which we ourselves, at times, and which a thou- 
sand casual recollections, recall to our memory. 
She is the preserver, the treasurer of our joys. 
Even in sickness and nervous diseases, she has 
208 



ANIMA FOETM 

peopled our wnagination with lovely forms which 
have sometimes overpowered the inward pain 
and brought with them their old sensations. 
And even when all men have seemed to desert 
us, and the friend of our heart has passed on, 
with one glance from his " cold, disliking eye " 
— yet even then the blue heaven spreads it out 
and bends over us, and the little tree still 
shelters us under its plumage as a second cope, 
a domestic firmament, and the low -creeping 
gale will sigh in the heath-plant and soothe us 
by sound of sympathy till the lulled grief lose 
itseK in fixed gaze on the purple heath-blos- 
som, till the present beauty becomes a vision of 
memory. 

I have never seen the evening star set be- hesperus 
hind the mountains, but it was as if I had 
lost a hope out of my soul, as if a love were 
gone, and a sad memory only remained. O it 
was my earliest affection, the evening star ! One 
of my first utterances in verse was an address to 
it as I was returning from the New Eiver, and it 
looked newly bathed as well as I. I remember 
that the substance of the sonnet was that the 
woman whom I could ever love would surely 
have been emblemed in the pensive serene 
brightness of that planet, that we were both 
constellated to it, and would after death return 
thither. 

TO THE EVENING STAR. to the 

O meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze, star 

I hail, sweet star, thy chaste effulgent glow ; 

On thee full oft with fixed eye I gaze, 
Till I, methinks, all spirit seem to grow. 
209 



ANIMA POETJi: 

O first and fairest of the starry choir, 

O loveliest 'mid the daughters of the night, 
Must not the maid I love like thee inspire 

Pure joy and calm delight ? 
Must she not be, as is thy placid sphere. 

Serenely brilliant ? Whilst to gaze awhile 
Be all my wish 'mid Fancy's high career 

E'en till she quit this scene of earthly toil ; 
Then Hope perchance might fondly sigh to join 
Her image in thy kindred orb, O star benign ! 

[First printed from MS. Poetical and Dra- 
matic Worhs, 1877-80 ; Poetical Works, 1893, 
p. 11.] 

HEALTH, Where health is — at least, though pain be 
E^° E^^ 1^0 stranger, yet when the breath can rise, and 
turn round like a comet at its perihelion in 
its ellipse, and again descend, instead of being 
a Sisiphus's stone ; and the chest can expand 
as by its own volition, and the head sits firm 
yet mobile aloft, like the vane of a tower on 
a hill shining in the blue air, and appropri- 
ating sunshine and moonlight whatever weight 
of clouds brood below — O when health and 
hope, and if not competence yet a debtless un- 
wealth, libera et Iceta paupertas, is his, a man 
may have and love many friends, but yet, if 
indeed they be friends, he lives with each a 
several and individual life. 



FRIEND 
SHIP 



SELF-AB- One source of calumny (I say source, because 

Ind^Iel- alloj>lioh]) from heautopithygmy is the only proper 

FisHNEss cat^se) may be found in this : every man's life 

exhibits two sorts of selfishness, those which are, 

and those which are not, objects of his own con- 

210 



ANIMA POET^ 

seiousness. A is thinking, perhaps, of some 
plan in which he may benefit another, and dur- 
ing this absorption consults his own little bodily 
comforts blindly — occupies the best place at the 
fireside, or asks at once, " Where am I to sit ? " 
instead of first inquiring after the health of an- 
other. Now the error lies here, that JB, in com- 
j)laining of A, first takes for granted either that 
these are acts of conscious selfishness in A, or, 
if he allows the truth, yet considers them just as 
bad (and so perhaps they may be in a certain 
sense), but forgets that his own life presents the 
same, judges of his own life exclusively by his 
own consciousness, that of another by conscious 
and unconscious in a lump. A monkey's anthro- 
pomorphic attitudes we take for anthropic. 

Try not to become disgusted with active self-ad 
benevolence, or despondent because there is a ^jf^ phi. 
philanthropy-trade. It is a sort of benefit-club ^'^^' 

t 1 if _ THKOPY 

of virtue, supported by the contributions of pau- 
pers in virtue, founded by genuine enthusiasts 
who gain a reputation for the thing — then slip 
in successors who know how to avail themselves 
of the influence and connections derived thereby 

— quite gratuitous, however, and bustling-active 

— but yet hribe high to become the unpaid phy- 
sicians of the dispensary at St. Luke's Hospital, 
and bow and scrape and intrigue, Carlyleize 
and Knappize for it. And such is the [case 
with regard to] the slave-trade. The first aboli- 
tionists were the good men who labored when 
the thing seemed desperate — it was virtue for 
its own sake. Then the quakers, Granville 
Sharp, etc. ; then the restless spirits who are 

211 



ANIMA POET^ 

under the action of tyrannical oppression from 
images, and, gradually, mixed vanity and love 
of power with it — the politicians -|- saints = 
Wilberf orce. Last come the Scotchmen — and 
Brougham is now canvassing more successfidly 
for the seat of Wilberforce, who retires with 
great honor and regret, from infirmities of age 
and enoughness. It is just as with the great 
original benefactors and founders of useful plans, 
Raleigh, Sir Hugh Middleton, etc., — men of 
genius succeeded by sharpers, but who often can 
better carry on what they never could have first 
conceived — and this, too, by their very want of 
those qualities and virtues which were necessary 
to the discovery. 

BUT LOVE All mere passions, like spirits and apparitions, 
have their hour of cockcrow, in which they must 
vanish. But pure love is, therefore, no mere 
passion ; and it is a test of its being love, that 
no reason can be assigned why it should disap- 
pear. Shall we not always, in this life at least, 
remain animce dimidiatce f — must not the moral 
reason always hold out the perfecting of each by 
union of both as good and lovely ? With rea- 
son, therefore, and conscience let love vanish, 
but let these vanish only with our being. 

THE FEINT Thc sick and sleepless man, after the dawn of 
SLEEPLESS tl^6 fresh day, is fain to watch the smoke now 
from this and then from the other chimney of 
the town from his bed-chamber, as if willing to 
borrow from others that sense of a new day, of a 
discontinuity between the yesterday and the to- 
day, which his own sensations had not afforded. 
212 



IS INDE. 

STRUCTI- 
BLE 



SHIP 



ANBIA POET.E 

[Compare Wordsworth's "Blessed Barrier Be- 
tween Day and Day," Wordsworth's Third Son- 
net to Sleep, Poetical Worhs, 1889, 354.] 

O what wisdom could I talk to a youth of first 
genius and genial-heartedness ! O how little and 
could I teach ! and yet, though despairing of ^'^^*^^°" 
success, I would attempt to enforce : " When- 
ever you meet with a person of undoubted tal- 
ents, more especially if a woman, and of apparent 
goodness, and yet you feel uncomfortable, and 
urged against your nature, and, therefore, proba- 
bly in vain, to be on your guard — then take 
yourself to task and enquire what strong reason, 
moral or prudential, you have to form any inti- 
macy or even familiarity with that person. If 
you after this (or moreover) detect any false- 
hood, or, what amounts to the same, proneness 
and quickness to look into, to analyze, to find 
out and represent evil or weakness in others 
(however this may be disguised even from the 
person's own mind by candor, [in] pointing out 
the good at the same time, by affectation of 
speculative truth, as psychologists, or of telling 
you all their thoughts as open-hearted friends), 
then let no reason but a strong and coercive one 
suffice to make you any other than as formal 
and distant acquaintance as circumstances will 
permit." And am I not now suffering, in part, 
for forcing my feelings into slavery to my no- 
tions, and intellectual admiration for a whole 

year and more with regard to ? [So the 

MS.] If I played the hypocrite to myself, can 

I blame my fate that he has, at length, played 

the deceiver to me ? Yet, God knows ! I did it 

213 



ANIMA POETiE 

most virtuously ! — not only without vanity or 
any self-interest of however subtle a nature, but 
from humility and a true delight in finding ex- 
cellence of any kind, and a disposition to fall 
prostrate before it. 



MILTON'S 

BLANK 

VERSE 



To understand fully the mechanism, in order 
fully to feel the incomparable excellence, of Mil- 
ton's metre, we must make four tables, or a four- 
fold compartment, the first for the feet, single 
and composite, for which the whole twenty-six 
feet of the ancients will be found necessary ; the 
second to note the construction of the feet, 
whether from different or from single words — 
for who does not perceive the difference to the 
ear between — 

" Inextricable disobedience," and 
" To love or not : in this we stand or fall " — 
yet both lines are composed of five iambics. 
The third, of the strength and position, the con- 
centration or diffusion of the emphasis. Fourth 
the length and position of the pauses. Then 
compare his narrative with the harangues. I 
have not noticed the ellipses, because they either 
do not affect the rhythm, or are not ellipses, but 
are comprehended in the feet. 



APHOK- 

ISMS 

OK PITHY 
SEN- 
TENCES 



Shall I compare man to a clockwork catama- 
ran, destined to float on in a meaner element 
for so many moments or hours, and then to ex- 
plode, scattering its involucrum and itself to 
ascend into its proper element ? 



I am persuaded that we love what is above us 
more than what is under us. 
214 



ANIMA POET^ 

Money — paper money — j^eace, war. How 
comes it that all men in all companies are talk- 
ing of the depreciation, etc., etc. — and yet that 
a discourse on transubstantiation wonld not be a 
more withering sirocco than the attempt to ex- 
plain philosophically the true cure and causes of 
that which interests all so vehemently ? 

]/ All convalescence is a resurrection, a palin- 
genesy of our youth — " and loves the earth and 
all that live thereon with a new heart." But 
oh ! the anguish to have the aching freshness of 
yearning and no answering object — only re- 
membrances of faithless change — and unmerited 
alienation ! 

The sun at evening holds up her fingers of 
both hands before her face that mortals may 
have one steady gaze — her transparent crimson 
fingers as when a lovely woman looks at the fire 
through her slender palms. 

i[y O that perilous moment [for such there is] of 
a half reconciliation, when the coldness and the 
resentment have been sustained too long. Each 
is drawing toward the other, but like glass in 
the mid-state between fusion and compaction a 
single sand will splinter it. 

Sometimes when I earnestly look at a beauti- 
ful object or landscape, it seems as if I were on 
the hrink of a fruition still denied — as if Vi- 
sion were an appetite ; even as a man would feel 
who, having put forth all his muscular strength 
in an act of prosilience, is at the very moment 
215 



ANIMA POETiE 

held bach — he leaps and yet moves not from his 
place. 

Philosophy in general, but a plummet to so 
short a line that it can sound no deeper than the 
sounder's eyes can reach — and yet — in cer- 
tain waters it may teach the exact depth and pre- 
vent a drowning. 

The midnight wild beasts staring at the 
hunter's torch, or when the hunter sees the 
tiger's eye glaring on the red light of his own 
torch. 

A summer-sailing on a still peninsulating 
river, and sweet as the delays of parting lovers. 

Sir r[rancis] B[urdett], like a Lapland witch 
drowned in a storm of her own raising. Mr. 
Cobbett, who, for a dollar, can raise what, offer 
him ten thousand dollars, he could not allay. 

August, Why do you make a book? Because my 

hands can extend but a few score inches from 
my body ; because my poverty keeps those hands 
empty when my heart aches to empty them; 
because my life is short, and [by reason of] my in- 
firmities ; and because a book, if it extends but 
to one edition, will probably benefit three or four 
score on whom I could not otherwise have acted, 
and, should it live and deserve to live, will make 
ample conpensation for all the aforestated infirm- 
ities. O, but think only of the thoughts, feel- 
ings, radical impulses that have been implanted 
in how many thousands by the little ballad of 
216 



ANIMA POETiE 

the "Children in the Wood"! The sphere of 
Alexander the Great's agency is trifling com- 
pared with it. 

One of the strangest and most painful pecu- presenti- 
liarities of my nature (unless others have the 
same, and, like me, hide it, from the same inex- 
plicable feeling of causeless shame and sense of 
a sort of guilt, joined with the apprehension of 
being feared and shrunk from as a something 
transnatural) I will here record — and my mo- 
tive, or, rather, impulse, to do this seems an ef- 
fort to eloign and abalienate it from the dark 
adyt of my own being by a visual outness, and not 
the wish for others to see it. It consists in a 
sudden second sight of some hidden vice, past, 
present, or to come, of the person or persons with 
whom I am about to form a close intimacy — 
which never deters me, but rather (as all these 
transnaturals) urges me on, just like the feeling 
of an eddy-torrent to a swimmer. I see it as a 
vision, feel it as a prophecy, not as one given me 
by any other being, but as an act of my own 
spirit, of the absolute nonmenon, which, in so 
doing, seems to have offended against some law 
of its being, and to have acted the traitor by a 
commune with full consciousness independent of 
the tenure or inflected state of association, cause, 
and effect, etc. 

As the most far-sighted eye, even aided by the the 
most powerful telescope, will not make a fixed stars of 
star appear larger than it does to an ordinary '^''i'^" 
and unaidecT sight, even so there are heights of 
knowledge and truth sublime which all men in 
217 



ANIMA POET^ 

possession of the ordinary human understanding 
may comprehend as much and as well as the pro- 
foundest philosoj)her and the most learned theo- 
logian. Such are the truths relating to the logos 
and its oneness with the self-existent Deity, and 
of the humanity of Christ and its union with the 
logos. It is idle, therefore, to refrain from 
preaching on these subjects, provided only such 
preparations have been made as no man can be a 
Christian without. The misfortune is that the 
majority are Christians only in name, and by 
birth only. Let them but once, according to St. 
James, have looked down steadfastly into the law 
of liberty or freedom in their own souls (the will 
and the conscience), and they are capable of 
whatever God has chosen to reveal. 

c'EST A long line of ( ! ! ) marks of admiration 

FiQUE," would be its aptest symbol ! It has given me 
n'e's^^pas *^^ eye-ache with dazzlement, the brain-ache with 
LA poEsiE wonderment, the stomach and all-ache with the 
shock and after-eddy of contradictory feelings. 
Splendor is there, splendor everywhere — dis- 
tinct the figures as vivid — skill in construction 
of events — beauties numberless of form and 
thought. But there is not anywhere the "one 
low piping note more sweet than all" — there is 
not the divine vision of the poet, which gives the 
full fruition of slg^ht without the effort — and 
where the feelings of the heart are struck, they 
are awakened only to complain of and recoil 
from the occasion. O ! it is mournful to see and 
wonder at such a marvel of labor, erudition, and 
talent concentred into such a burning-glass of 
factitious power, and yet to know that it is all in 
218 



ANIMA POETiE 

vain. Like the Pyramids, it shows what can be 
done, and, like them, leaves in painful and almost 
scornful perplexity why it was done, for what or 
whom. 

Grand rule in case of quarrels between friends silence 
or lovers — never to say, hint, or do anything Septelirber 
in a moment of anger or indignation or sense of ^'^' ^^^'^ 
ill treatment, but to be passive — and even if the 
fit should recur the next morning, still to delay 
it — in short, however plausible the motive may 
be, yet if you have loved the persons concerned, 
not to say it till their love has returned towards 
you, and your feelings are the same as they were 
before. And for this plain reason — you knew 
this before, and yet because you were in kind- 
ness, you never felt an imj)ulse to speak of it — 
then, surely, not now when you may perpetuate 
what would otherwise be fugitive. 

" That not one of the peculiarities of Chris- the 
tianity, no one point in which, being clearly kecanta- 
different from other religions or philosophies, ^"'^ 
it would have, at least, the poasihility of being 
superior to all, is retained by the modern Unita- 
rians." This remark is occasioned by my reflec- 
tions on the fact that Christianity exclusively has 
asserted the positive being of evil or sin, " of sin 
the exceeding sinfulness " — and thence exclu- 
sively the freedom of the creature, as that, the 
clear institution of which is both the result and 
the accompaniment of redemption. The nearest 
philosophy to Christianity is the Platonic, and it 
is observable that this is the mere antipodes of 
the Hartleio-Lockian held by the Unitarians; 
219 



ANIMA POET^ 

but the true honors of Christianity would be most 
easily manifested by a comparison even with that 
" nee pari nee seciindo,^^ but yet " omnibus aliis 
pro'priore^'' the Platonic ! With what conterajDt, 
even in later years, have I not contemplated the 
doctrine of the devil ! but now I see the intimate 
connection, if not as existent person^ yet as es- 
sence and symbol with Christianity — and that 
so far from being identical with Manicheism, it 
is the surest antidote (that is, rightly under- 
stood). 

220 



CHAPTER IX. 

1SU-181S. 

Lynx amid moles ! had I stood by thy bed, 

Be of good cheer, meek soul ! I would have said : 

I see a hope spring from that humble fear. 

S. T. C. 

The first man of science was lie who looked science 
into a thing, not to learn whether it could fur- losophy' 
nish him with food, or shelter, or weapons, 
or tools, or ornaments, or 2:)laywiths, but who 
sought to know it for the gratification of 
hnoiding ; while he that first sought to hnow 
in order to he was the first philosopher. I have 
read of two rivers passing through the same 
lake, yet all the way preserving their streams 
visibly distinct — if I mistake not, the Rhone 
and the Adar, through the Lake of Geneva. In 
a far finer distinction, yet in a subtler union, 
such, for the contemplative mind, are the streams 
of knowing and being. The lake is formed by 
the two streams in man and nature as it exists 
in and for man; and up this lake the philoso- 
pher sails on the junction-line of the constituent 
streams, still pushing upward and sounding as 
he goes, towards the common fountain-head of 
both, the mysterious source whose being is 
knowledge, whose knowledge is being — the 
adorable I AM in that I am. 



I have culled the following extracts from the pe- 
First Epistle of the First Book of Petrarch's epistles 
221 



ANIMA POET^ 

Epistle, that Barhato Salmonensi. [Basil, 1554, 
i. 76.] 

Vultus, heu, blanda severi 
Majestas, placidaeque decus pondusque senectae ! 

Non omnia terras 
Obruta ! vivit amor, vivit dolor ! Ora negatum 
Dulcia conspicere ; at flere et meminisse relictum 

est. 

Jamque observatio vitsB 
Multa dedit — lugere nihil, f erre omnia ; jamque 
Paulatim lacrymas rerum experientia tersit. 
[Heu ! et spem quoque tersit] 

Pectore nunc gelido calidos miseremur amantes, 
Jamque arsisse pudet. Veteres tranquilla tu- 

multus 
Mens horret, relegensque alium putat esse lo- 

cutum. 

But, indeed, the whole of this letter deserves 
to be read and translated. Had Petrarch lived a 
century later, and, retaining all his suhstantiality 
of head and heart, added to it the elegancies and 
manly politure of Fracastorius, Flaminius, Vida 
and their corrivals, this letter would have been 
a classical gem. To a translator of genius, and 
who possessed the English language as unem- 
barrassed property, the defects of style in the 
original would present no obstacle ; nay, rather 
an honorable motive in the well-grounded hope 
of rendering the version a finer poem than the 
original. 

[Twelve lines of Petrarch's Ep. Barhato Sal- 
222 



ANIMA POET^ 

monensi are quoted in the Biog. Liter, at the 
end of chapter x. ; and a portion of the same 
poem was prefixed as a motto to " Love Poems " 
in the Sibylline Leaves, 1817, and the editions 
of P. W., 1828-29 ; Coleridge's Works, Harper 
and Brother, 1853, iii. 314. See, too, P. W., 
1893, Editors Note, pp. 614, 634.] 

A fine writer of bad principles or a fine poem corrup- 
on a hateful subject, such as the " Alexis " of optimi 
Virgil, or the " Bathyllus " of Anacreon, I com- ^^ssima 
pare to the flowers and leaves of the Stramoniimi. 
The flowers are remarkable sweet, but such is the 
fetid odor of the leaves, that you start back from 
the one through disgust at the other. 



MAN 



Zephyrs that captive roam among these boughs, a bliss 
Strive ye in vain to thread the leafy maze ? alive 

Or have ye lim'd your wings with honey-dew? 
Unfelt ye murmur restless o'er my head 
And rock the feeding drone or bustling bees 
That blend their eager, earnest, happy hum ! 

Gravior terras infestat Echidna, what 

^ . • 1 i^ . • !• MAN HAS 

Cur sua viperese jaculantur toxica linguae made of 

Atque homini sit homo serpens. O prodiga 

culpae 
Germina, naturaeque uteri f atalia monstra ! 
Quels nimis innocuo volupe est in sanguine ric- 
tus 
Tingere, fraternasque fibras cognataque per se 
Viscera, et arrosas deglubere funera famae. 
Quae morum ista lues ! 

25th Feb., 1819. Five years since the preced- 
ing lines were written on this leaf ! ! Ah ! how 
223 



FROM MY 

FKIENDS 



ANIMA POET^ 

yet more intrusively has the hornet scandal 
since then scared away the bee of poetic thought 
and silenced its " eager, earnest, happy hum " ! 

SAVE ME The sore evil now so general, alas ! only not 
universal, of supporting our religion, just as a keen 
party-man would support his party in Parliament. 
All must be defended which can give a momen- 
tary advantage over any one opponent, no mat- 
ter how naked it lays the cause open to another, 
perhaps, more formidable opponent — no matter 
how incompatible the two assumptions may be. 
We rejoice, not because our religion is the truth, 
but because the truth appears to be our religion. 
Talk with any dignified orthodoxist in the sober 
way of farther preferment and he will concrete 
all the grounds of Socinianism, talk Paley and the 
Resurrection as a proof, and as the only proper 
proofs of our immortality ; will give to external 
evidence and miracles the self-grounded force, 
the same f undamentality. Even so the old Puri- 
tans felt towards the Papists. Because so much 
was wrong, everything was wrong, and by deny- 
ino- all reverence to the fathers and to the con- 
stant tradition of the Catholic churches, they 
undermined the wall of the city in order that it 
midit fall on the heads of the Romanists — 
thoughtless that by this very act they made a 
breach for the Arian and Socinian to enter. 



DRIP DRIP 
DRIP DRIP 



The ear-deceiving imitation of a steady soak- 
ing rain, while the sky is in full uncurtainment 
of sprinkled stars and milky stream and dark 
blue interspace. The rain had held up for two 
hours or more, but so deep was the silence of the 
224 



DIUM 
AMORIS 



ANIMA POETiE 

night that the drip from the leaves of the garden 
trees copied a steady shower. 

So intense are my affections, and so despot- reme 
ically am I governed by them (not indeed so 
much as I once was, but still far, far too much), 
that I should be the most wretched of men if my 
love outlived my esteem. But this, thank Hea- 
ven ! is the antidote. The bitterer the tear of 
anguish at the clear detection of misapj^lied at- 
tachment, the calmer I am afterwards. It is a 
funeral tear for an object no more. 



February 23, 1816. the cox 

I thought I expressed my thoughts well when qf^the^ 
I said, " There is no superstition but what has a whole 

. . ^ , , , MATTER 

religion as its base [or radical], and religion is 
only reason, seen perspectively by a finite intel- 
lect." 



It is a common remark, in medical books for the 
instance, that there are certain niceties which 
words, from their always abstract and so far 
general nature, cannot convey. Now this I am 
disposed to deny, that is, in any comparative 
sense. In my opinion there is nothing which, 
being equally known as any other thing, may not 
be conveyed by words with equal clearness. But 
the question of the sonrce of the remark is, to 
whom ? If I say that in jaundice the skin looks 
yellow, my words have no meaning for a man 
who has no sense of colors. Words are but re- 
membrances, though remembrance may be so 
excited, as by the a priori powers of the mind to 
produce a tertium aliqiiid. The utmost, there- 
225 



POWER OF 
WORDS 



ANIMA POET.E 

fore, tliat should be said is that every additament 
of perception requires a new word, which (like all 
other words) will be intelligible to all who have 
seen the subject recalled by it, and who have 
learnt that such a word or phrase was appropri- 
ated to it ; and this may be attained either by a 
new word, as platinum, titanium, osmium, etc., 
for the new metals, or an epithet peculiarizing the 
application of an old word. For instance, no 
one can have attended to the brightness of the 
eyes in a healthy person in high spirits and par- 
ticularly delighted by some occurrence, and that 
of the eye of a person deranged or predisposed 
to derangement, without observing the differ- 
ence ; and, in this case, the phrase " a maniacal 
glitter of the eye " conveys as clear a notion as 
that jaundice is marked by yellow. There is, 
doubtless, a difference, but no other than that of 
the comjnencement of particular knowledge by 
the application of universal knowledge (that is, 
to all who have the senses and common faculties 
of men), and the next step of knowledge when it 
particularizes itself. But the defect is not in 
words, but in the imperfect knowledge of those 
to whom they are addressed. Then proof is ob- 
vious. Desire a physician or metaphysician or a 
lawyer to mention the most perspicuous book in 
their several knowledges. Then bid them read 
that book to a sensible carpenter or shoemaker, 
and a great part will be as unintelligible as a 
technical treatise on carpentering to the lawyer 
or physician, who had not been brought up in a 
carpenter's shop or looked at his tools. 

I have dwelt on this for more reasons than 
one : first, because a remark that seems at fu'st 
226 



ANIMA POET^ 

sight the same, namely, that " everything clearly 
perceived may be conveyed in simple common 
language," without taking in the "to whom?" 
is the disease of the age — an arrogant pusilla- 
nimity, a hatred of all information that cannot 
be obtained without thinking ; and, secondly, 
because the pretended imperfection of language 
is often a disguise of muddy thoughts ; and, 
thirdly, because to the mind itself it is made an 
excuse for indolence in determining what the fact 
or truth is which is the premise. For whether 
there does or does not exist a term in our present 
store of words significant thereof — if not, a word 
must be made — and, indeed, all wise men have 
so acted from Moses to Aristotle, and from Theo- 
phrastus to Linnaeus. 

The sum, therefore, is this : The conveyal of 
knowledge by words is in direct proportion 
to the stores and faculties of observation (in- 
ternal or external) of the person who hears or 
reads them. And this holds equally whether I 
distinguish the green grass from the white lily 
and the yellow crocus, which all who have eyes 
understand, because all are equal to me in the 
knowledge of the facts signified — or of the 
difference between the apprehensive, perceptive, 
conceptive, and conclusive powers which I might 
[try to enimciate to] Doctors of Divinity and 
they would translate the words by Abra Ca 
Dahra. 

Reflections on my four gaudy flower-pots, flowers' 
compared with the former flower-poems. After Sunday^*^^ 
a certain period, crowded with counterfeiters of ^?^ ^' 
poetry, and illustrious with true poets, there is 

227 



SPIRITUAIi 
BLIND- 
MESS 



ANIMA POET^ 

formed for common use a vast garden of lan- 
guage : all the showy and all the odorous words 
and clusters of words are brought together, and 
to be plucked by mere mechanic and passive 
memory. In such a state, any man of coimnon 
poetical reading, having a strong desire (to be ? 
— O no ! but — ) to be thought a poet will 
present a flower-pot gay and gaudy, but the 
composition ! That is wanting. We carry on 
judgment of times and circumstances into our 
pleasures. A flower-pot which woidd have en- 
chanted us before flower gardens were common, 
for the very beauty of the component flowers, 
will be rightly condemned as commonplace, out 
of place (for such is a commonplace poet) — it 
involves a contradiction both in terms and 
thought. So Homer's Juno, Minerva, etc., are 
read with delight — but Blackmore ? This is 
the reason why the judgment of those who are 
newlings in poetic reading is not to be relied on. 
The positive, which belongs to all, is taken as 
the comparative, which is the individual's praise. 
A good ear which had never heard music — with 
what raptures would it praise one of Shield's 
or Arne's Pasticcios and Centos ! But it is 
the human mind it praises, not the individual. 
Hence it may happen (I believe has happened) 
that fashionableness may produce popularity. 
" The Beggar's Petition " is a fair instance, and 
what if I dared to add Gray's " Elegy in a 
Country Churchyard " ? 

Men who direct what they call their under- 
standing or common sense by rules abstracted 
from sensuous experience in moral and suj^er- 

228 



ANIMA POET.E 

sensuous truths remind one of the zemmi (mus 
TvtfiXos or typMus)^ " a kind of rat in which the 
skin (conjunctiva) is not even transparent over 
the eye, but is there covered with hairs as in the 
rest of the body. The eye (=the understand- 
ing), which is scarcely the size of the poppy-seed, 
is perfectly useless." An eel {inurmna ccecil'ia) 
and the myxine (^gastohranchus ccecus) are 
blind in the same manner, through the opacity of 
the conjunctiva. 

Sir G. Staunton asserts that, in the forests of insects 
Java, spiders' webs are found of so strong a 
texture as to require a sharp-cutting instrument 
to make way through them. Pity that he did 
not procure a specimen and bring it home with 
him. It would be a pleasure to see a sailing- 
boat rigged with them — twisting the larger 
threads into ropes and weaving the smaller into 
a sort of silk canvas resembling the indestructible 
white cloth of the arindy or palma Christi silk- 
worm. 

The Libellulidce fly all ways without needing 
to turn their bodies — onward, backward, right, 
and left — with more than swallow - rivalling 
rapidity of wing, readiness of evolution, and in- 
defatigable continuance. 

The merry little gnats (^Tipulidm minimce) I 
have myself often watched in an April shower, 
evidently " dancing the hayes " in and out be- 
tween the falling drops, un wetted, or, rather, 
undown-dashed by rocks of water many times 
larger than their whole bodies. 
229 



ANIMA POET^ 

Sunday,' A valuable remark has just struck me on 
25^1817 reading Milton's beautiful passage on true elo- 
quence, Kis apology for Smectyminus. " For 
me, reader, though I cannot say," etc. — first, to 
show the vastly greater numbers of admirable 
passages, in our elder writers, that may be 
gotten by heart as the most exquisite poems ; 
and to point out the great intellectual advantage 
of this reading, over the gliding smoothly on 
through ' a whole volume of equability. But 
still, it will be said, there is an antiquity, an 
oddness, in the style. Granted; but hear this 
same passage from the Smectyminus, or this, or 
this. Every one would know at first hearing 
that they were not written by Gibbon, Hume, 
Johnson, or Robertson. But why? Are they 
not pure English ? Ay ! incomparably more 
so ! Are not the words precisely appropriate, so 
that you cannot change them without changing 
the force and meaning? Ay! But are they 
not even now intelligible to man, woman, and 
child ? Ay ! there is no riddle-my-ree in them. 
What, then, is it? The unnatural, false, af- 
fected style of the moderns, that makes sense 
and simplicity oddness. 

oBDucTA Even to a sense of shrinking, I felt in this 
man's face and figure what a shape comes to 
view when age has dried away the mask from a 
bad, depraved man, and flesh and color no longer 
conceal or palliate the traits of the countenance. 
Then shows itself the indurated nerve ; stiff and 
rigid in all its ugliness the inflexible muscle ; 
then quiver the naked lips, the cold, the love- 
less ; then blinks the turbid eye, whose glance no 
230 



FRONTE 
SENECTUS 



ANIMA POET^ 

longer pliant fixes, abides in its evil expression. 
Then lie on the powerless forehead the wrin- 
kles of suspicion and fear, and conscience-stung 
watchfulness. Contrast this with the counte- 
nance of Mrs. Gillman's mother as she once de- 
scribed it to me. This for *"Puff and Slander," 
Highgate, 1817. 

[* A projected satire, of which, perhaps, the 
lines headed " A Character " were an instalment. 
See P. W., 1893, pp. 195-642 ; Letters of S. 
T. a, 1895, ii. 631.] 

When the little creature has slept out its sleep a " king- 
and stilled its hunger at the mother's bosom heav*e^- 
(that very hunger a mode of love all made up of ^'^^•" ■ 
kisses), and coos, and wantons with pleasure, 
and laughs, and plays bob-cherry with his mother, 
that is all, all to it. It understands not either 
itself or its mother, but it clings to her, and has 
an undeniable right to cling to her, seeks her, 
thanks her, loves her without forethought and 
without an afterthought. 

Nee miJii, Christe, tua sufficiunt sine te, nee a divine 
tlhi placent niea sine me, exclaims St. Bernard. 
JVota Bene. This single epigram is worth 
(shall I say — O far rather — is a sufficient an- 
tidote to) a wagon-load of Paleyan moral and 
political philosophies. 

We all look up to the blue sky for comfort, but seriores 
nothing appears there, nothing comforts, nothing 
answers us, and so we die. 

Lie with the ear upon a dear friend's grave. 
231 



ANIMA POET^ 



A PLEA 
FOK 

SCHOLAS- 
TIC 
TERMS 



On the same man, as in a vineyard, grow far 
different grapes, — on the sunny south nectar, 
and on the bleak north verjuice. 

The blossom gives not only future fruit, but 
present honey. We may take the one, the other 
nothing injured. 

Like some spendthrift lord, after we have 
disposed of nature's great masterpiece and [price- 
less] heirloom, the wisdom of innocence, we hang 
up as a poor copy our [own base] cunning. 

The revival of classical literature, like all other 
revolutions, was not an unmixed good. One 
evil was the passion for pure Latin ity, and a con- 
sequent contempt for the barbarism of the scho- 
lastic style and terminology. For a while the 
schoolmen made head against their assailants ; 
but, alas ! all the genius and eloquence of the 
world was against them, and by an additional 
misfortune the scholastic logic was professed by 
those who had no other attainments, namely, 
the monks, and these, from monkishness, were 
the enemies of all genius and liberal knowledge. 
They were, of course, laughed out of the field as 
soon as they lost the power of aiding their logic 
by the post-predicaments of dungeon, fire, and 
fagot. Henceforward speculative philosophy 
must be written classically, that is, without tech- 
nical terms, — therefore popularly ; and the 
inevitable consequence was that those sciences 
only were progressive which were permitted by 
the apparent as well as real necessity of the case 
to have a scientific terminology — as mathesis, 
232 



ANIMA POET^ 

geometry, astronomy, and so forth, while meta- 
physics sank and died, and an empirical, highly 
superficial psychology took its place. And so it 
has remained in England to the present day. A 
man must have felt the pain of being compelled 
to express himself either laxly or paraphrastically 
(which latter is almost as great an impediment in 
intellectual construction as the translation of let- 
ters and symbols into the thought they represent 
would be in Algebra) in order to understand how 
much a metaphysician suffers from not daring to 
adopt the ivitates and eitates of the schoolmen 
as objectivity, subjectivity, negativity, positivity. 
April 2, 1817, Tuesday night. 

The sentimental cantilena respecting the be- the body 
nignity and loveliness of nature — how does it 
not sink before the contemplation of the pravity 
of nature, on whose reluctance and inaptness a 
form is forced (the mere reflex of that form 
which is itself absolute substance!), and which 
it struggles against, bears but for a while, and 
then sinks with the alacrity of self-seeking into 
dust or sanies, which falls abroad into endless 
nothings, or creeps and cowers in poison, or 
explodes in havoc ! What is the beginning ? 
what the end ? And how evident an alien is the 
supernatural in the brief interval ! 



OF THIS 
DEATH 



ALISM 
AND 

MYSTI- 



There are many, alas ! too many, either born spikitu 
or who have become deaf and dumb. So there 
are too many who have perverted the religion 
of the spirit into the superstition of spirits that 
mutter and mock and mow, like deaf and dumb 
idiots. Plans of teaching the deaf and dumb 
233 



ANIMA POETJE 

have been invented. For these the deaf and 
dumb owe thanks, and we for their sakes. Ho- 
mines sumus et nihil hiimani a nobis alienum. 
But does it follow, therefore, that in all schools 
these plans of teaching should be followed ? Yet 
in the other case this is insisted on — and the 
Holy Ghost must not be our guide because mys- 
ticism and ghosts may come in under this name. 
Why ? Because the deaf and dumb have been 
promoted to superintendents of education at large 
for all ! 



IDEATJSM 
AND SU- 
PERSTI- 
TION 



Save only in that in which I have a right to 
demand of every man that he should be able 
to understand me, the experience or inward 
witnessing of the conscience, and in respect of 
which every man in real life (even the very dis- 
putant who affects doubt or denial in the moment 
of metaphysical arguing) would hold himself 
insulted by the supposition that he did not 
understand it — save in this only, and in th^t 
which if it be at all must be unique^ and there- 
fore cannot be supported by an analogue, and 
which, if it be at all, must be first, and therefore 
cannot have an antecedent, and therefore may 
be monstrated, but cannot be f?emonstrated. — 
I am no ghost-seer, I am no believer in appari- 
tions. I do not contend for indescribable sen- 
sations, nor refer to, much less ground my con- 
victions on, blind feelings or incommunicable 
experiences, but far rather contend against these 
superstitions in the mechanic sect, and impeach 
you as guilty, habitually and systematically 
guilty, of the same. Guilty, I say, of superstitions, 
which at worst are but exceptions and jits in the 
234 



ANIMA POETiE 

poor self -misapprehending pietists, with whom, 
under the name mystics, you would fain con- 
found and discredit all who receive and worship 
God in spirit and in truth, and in the former as 
the only possible mode of the latter. Accord- 
ing to your own account, your own scheme, you 
know nothing but your own sensations, inde- 
scribable inasmuch as they are sensations — for 
the appropriate expression even of which we 
must fly not merely to the indeclinables in the 
lowest parts of speech, but to human articulations 
that only (like musical notes) stand for inar- 
ticulate sounds — the 6l, ot, irairai of the Greek 
tragedies, or, rather, Greek oratorios. You see 
nothing, but only by a sensation that conjures 
up an image in your own brain, or optic nerve 
(as in a nightmare), have an apparition, in con- 
sequence of which, as again in the nightmare, 
you are forced to believe for the moment, and 
are inclined to infer the existence of a corre- 
sponding reality out of your brain, but by what 
intermediation you cannot even form an intel- 
ligible conjecture. During the years of ill-health 
from disturbed digestion, I saw a host of appari- 
tions, and heard them too — but I attributed 
them to an act in my brain. You, according 
to your own showing, see and hear nothing but 
apparitions in your brain, and strangely at- 
tribute them to things that are outside your 
skill. Which of the two notions is most like 
the philosopher, which the superstitionist ? The 
philosopher, who makes my apparitions nothing 
but apparitions — a brain-image nothing more 
than a brain-image — and affirm niliil super 
stare — or you and yours who vehemently con- 
235 



ANIMA POETiE 

tend that it is but a brain-image, and yet cry, 
" ast siiperstitit aliquid. Est superstitlo alicnjns 
quod in externo, id est^ in apparenti non ajj- 
pareV 

What is outness, external and the like, but 
either the generalization of apparence or the 
result of a given degree, a comparative intensity 
of the same? "I see it in my mind's eye," 
exclaims Hamlet, when his thoughts were in his 
own purview the same phantom, yea ! in a higher 
intensity, became his father's ghost and marched 
along the platform. I quoted your own exposi- 
tion, and dare you with these opinions charge 
others with superstition ? You who deny aught 
permanent in our being, — you with whom the 
soul, yea, the soul of the soul, our conscience 
and morality, are but the tune from a fragile 
barrel-organ played by air and water, and whose 
life, therefore, must of course be a p>ointing to 
— as of a Marcellus or a Hamlet — " 'T is here ! 
'T is gone ! " Were it possible that I could 
actually believe such a system, I should not be 
scared from striking it, from its being so majes- 
tical ! 



THE 

GREATER 
DAMNA- 
TION 



The old law of England punishes those who 
dig up the bones of the dead for superstitious 
or magical purposes, that is, in order to injure 
the living. What, then, are they guilty of who 
uncover the dormitories of the departed, and 
throw their souls into hell, in order to cast odium 
on a living truth ? 



Darwin possesses the epidermis of poetry but 
not the cutis ; the cortex without the liher^ aXbur- 
236 



ANIMA POET^ 



num, lignum^ or medulla. And no wonder ! for daewin's 
the inner bark or liber\ alburnum, and wood are 



CAL GAR- 
DEN 



one and the same substance, in different periods 
of existence. 

" It is a mile and a half in height." " How seven- 
much is that in yards or feet ? " The mind rests deed and 
satisfied in producing a correspondency in its ^^^^^^ 
own thouofhts, and in the exponents of those ^ot ex- 
thoughts. This seems to be a matter purely mile 
analytic, not yet properly synthetic. It is rather 
an interchange of equivalent acts, but not the 
same acts. In the yard I am prospective ; in the 
mile I seem to be retrospective. Come, a hun- 
dred strides more, and we shall have come a 
mile. This, if true, may be a subtlety, but 
is it necessarily a trifle ? May not many com- 
mon but false conclusions originate in the neg- 
lect of this distinction — in the confounding of 
objective and subjective logic ? 

I like salt to my meat so well that I can scarce of a too 
say grace over meat without salt. But salt to book 
one's salt ! Ay ! a sparkling, dazzling, lit-up 
saloon or subterranean minster in a vast mine of 
rock-salt — what of it ? — f uU of white pillars 
and aisles and altars of eye-dazzling salt. Well, 
what of it ? — 't were an uncomfortable lodging 
or boarding house — in short, all my eye. Now, 
I am content with a work if it be but my eye and 
Betty Martin, because, having never heard any 
charge against the author of the adage, candor 
obliges me to conclude that Eliza Martin is 
" sense for certain." In short, never was a meta- 
phor more lucky, apt, ramescent, and fructiferous 
237 



ANIMA POET^ 

— a hundred branches, and each hung with a 
different graft-fruit — than salt as typical of wit 

— the uses of both being the same, not to nour- 
ish, but to season and preserve nourishment. 
Yea ! even when there is plenty of good substan- 
tial meat to incorporate with, stout aitch-bone 
and buttock, still there may be too much ; and 
they who confine themselves to such meals will 
contract a scorbutic habit of intellect (i. e., a 
scurvy taste), and, with loose teeth and tender 
gums, become incapable of chewing and digest- 
ing hard matters of mere plain thinking. 

SPOOKS It is thus that the Glanvillians reason. First, 

they assume the facts as objectively as if the ques- 
tion related to the exiDerimentable of our senses. 
Secondly, they take the imaginative possibility 

— that is, that the [assumed] facts involve no 
contradiction, [as if it were] a scientific possibil- 
ity. And, lastly, they [advocate] them as proofs 
of a spiritual world and our own immortality. 
This last [I hold to] be the greatest insult to 
conscience and the greatest incongruity with the 
objects of religion. 

N. B. It is amusing, in all ghost stories, etc., 
that the recorders are " the farthest in the world 
from being credulous," or "as far from believing 
such things as any man." 

If a man could pass through Paradise in a 
dream, and have a flower presented to him as a 
pledge that his soul had really been there, and if 
he found that flower in his hand when he awoke 

— Ay ! and what then ? 

238 



ANIMA POET^ 

The more exquisite and delicate a flower of 
joy, the tenderer must be the hand that plucks it. 

Floods and general inundations render for the 
time even the purest springs turbid. 

For compassion a human heart suffices ; but 
for full, adequate sympathy with joy, an angel's. 
239 



CHAPTER X. 



1819-182S. 



THE 
MOON'S 
HALO AN 
EMBLEM 
OF HOPE 



Where'er I find the Good, the True, the Fair, 
I ask no names — God's spirit dwelleth there ! 
The unconfounded, undivided Three, 
Each for itself, and all in each, to see 
In man and Nature, is Philosophy. 



S. T. C. 



The moon, rushing onward through the cours- 
ing clouds, advances like an indignant warrior 
through a fleeing army ; but the amber halo in 
which he moves — O ! it is a circle of Hope. 
For what she leaves behind her has not lost its 
radiance as it is melting away into oblivion, 
while, still, the other semicircle catches the rich 
light at her approach, and heralds her ongress. 



A COM- 
PLEX 



It is by strength of mind that we are to un- 
vEXATioN twist the tie or copula of the besom of affliction, 
which not nature but the strength of imagination 
had twisted round it, and thus resolve it into its 
component twigs, and conquer in detail "one 
down and t' other come on " ! Dividendo dimi- 
nuitur — which forms the true ground of the 
advantage accruing from communicating our 
griefs to another. We enable ourselves to see 
them each in its true magnitude. 



THE 
RIGHT- 
EOUS- 
NESS OF 
ENGLAND 



After re-perusal of my inefficient, yet not 
feeble efforts in behalf of the poor little white 
slaves in the cotton-factories, I ask myself, " But 
240 



ANIMA POET^ 

still are we not better than the other nations of 
Christendom ? " Yes — Perhaps. I don't know. 
I dare not affirm it. Better than the French cer- 
tainly ! Mammon versus Moloch and Belial. 
But Sweden, Norway, Germany, the Tyrol ? No. 

There is a species of applause scarcely less ge- the 
nial to a poet, whether bard, musician, or artist, puaise 
than the vernal warmth to the feathered songsters 
during their nest-building or incubation — a sym- 
pathy, an expressed hope, that is the open air in 
which the poet breathes, and without which the 
sense of power sinks back on itself like a sigh 
heaved up from the tightened chest of a sick 
man. Alas ! alas ! alas ! 

Anonymity is now an artifice to acquire celeb- the 
rity, as a black veil is worn to make a pair of unknown 
bright eyes more conspicuous. 

For the same reasons that we cannot now act book- 
by impulses, but must think, so now must every fok leg- 
legislator be a man of sound book-learning, be- ^^^^'^•^"'^ 
cause he cannot, if he would, think or act from 
the simple dictates of unimproved but unde- 
praved common sense. Newspapers, reviews, 
and the conversation of men who derive their 
opinions from newspapers and reviews will se- 
cure for him artificial opinions, if he does not 
secure them for himself from purer and more 
authentic sources. There is now no such beins: 
as a country gentleman. Like their relation, 
the Dodo, the race is extinct, or if by accident 
one has escaped, it belongs to the Museum, not 
to active life, or the purposes of active life. 
241 



ANIMA POET^ 

THEISM The more I read and reflect on the arguments 

ATHEISM of the truly philosophical theists and atheists, 
the more I feel convinced that the ultimate dif- 
ference is a moral rather than an intellectual 
one ; that the result is an tc y s, an acknowledged 
insufficiency of the known to account for itself, 
and, therefore, a something unknown — that to 
which, while the atheist leaves it a blank in the 
understanding, the theist dedicates his noblest 
feelings of love and awe, and with which, by a 
moral syllogism, he connects and unites his con- 
science and actions. For the words goodness 
and wisdom are clearly only reflexes of the effect, 
just as when we call the unknown cause of cold 
and heat by the name of its effects, and know 
nothing further. For if we mean that a Being 
like man, with human goodness and intellect, 
only magnified, is the cause, that is, that the 
First Cause is an immense man (as according to 
Swedenborg and Zinzendorf), then come the 
insoluble difficulties of the incongruity of quali- 
ties whose very essence implies finiteness, with a 
Being ex hypothesi infinite. 

THE An excellent instance of the abstraction [from 

EYE° ^ objects of the sense] that results from the atten- 
tion converging to any one object is furnished 
by the oily rags, broken saucers, greasy phials, 
dabs, crusts, and smears of paints in the labo- 
ratory of a Raphael, or a Claude Lorraine, or 
a Van Huysum, or any other great master of 
the beautiful and becoming. In like manner, 
the mud and clay in the modelling hand of a 
Chantrey — what are they to him whose total 
soul is awake, in his eye as a subject, and be- 
242 



ANIMA POET^ 

fore his eye as some ideal of beauty ohjectively ? 
The various objects of the senses are as little the 
objects of his senses, as the ink with which the 
" Lear " was written existed in the conscious- 
ness of a Shakspere. 

The humming-moth with its glimmer-mist of a land of 
rapid unceasing motion before, the humble-bee ^^^^^ 
within the flowering bells and cups — and the 
eagle level with the clouds, himself a cloudy 
speck, surveys the vale from mount to mount. 
From the cataract flung on the vale, the broadest 
fleeces of the snowy foam light on the bank flow- 
ers or the water-lilies in the stiller pool below. 



E AND 
ETEKKITY 



The defect of Archbishop Leighton's reason- tim 
ing is the taking eternity for a sort of time, a ^ 
haro major, a baron of beef or quarter of lamb, 
out of which and off which time is cut, as a bris- 
ket or shoulder, — while, even in common dis- 
course, without any design of sounding the depth 
of the truth or of weighing the words expressing 
it in the hair-balance of metaphysics, it would be 
more convenient to consider eternity the simid et 
totum as the antitheton of time. 

The extraordinary florency of letters under the lit- 
the Spanish Caliphate in connection with the sterility 
character and capabilities of Mohammedanism "^'' islam- 
has never yet been treated as its importance re- 
quires. Halini II., founder of the University of 
Cordova, and of numerous colleges and libraries 
throughout Spain, is said to have possessed a 
library of six hundred thousand MSS., the cata- 
logue filling forty-four volumes. Nor were his 
243 



ISM 



ANIMA POET^ 

successors behind him in zeal and munificence. 
That the prime article of Islamism, the uni-per- 
sonality of God, is one cause of the downfall, 
say rather of the merely meteoric existence of 
their literary age, I am persuaded, but the exclu- 
sive scene (in Spain) suggests many interesting 
views. With a learned class Mohammedanism 
could not but pass into Deism, and Deism never 
did, never can, establish itself as a religion. It 
is the doctrine of the tri-unity that connects 
Christianity with philosophy, gives a positive 
religion a specific interest to the philosopher, 
and that of redemption to the moralist and 
psychologist. Predestination, in the plenitude, 
in which it is equivalent to fatalism, was the 
necessary alternative and succedaneum of Re- 
demption, and the Incarnation the only pre- 
servative against pantheism on one side, and 
anthropomorphism on the other. The Persian 
(Europeans in Asia) form of Mohammedanism 
is very striking in this point of view. 

THE It is not by individual character that an indi- 

vidual can derive just conclusions respecting a 
community or an age. Conclusions so drawn are 
the excuse of selfish, narrow, and pusillanimous 
statesmen, who, by dwelling on the kindred base- 
ness or folly of the persons with whom they 
come in immediate contact, lose all faith in 
human nature, ignorant that even in these a 
spark is latent which would light up and con- 
sume the worthless overlay in a national moment. 
The spirit of a race is the character of a people, 
the sleep or the awakening of which depends on 
a few minds, preordained for this purpose, and 
244 



SPIRIT OF 
A PEOPLE 



ANIMA POETiE 

sometimes by the mere removal of the dead 
weight of a degenerate Court or nobility press- 
ing- on the spring. So I doubt not would it be 
with the Turks, were the Porte and its seraaiio 
conquered by Russia. But the spirit of a race 
ought never to be supposed extinct, but on the 
other hand no more or other ought to be ex- 
pected than the raco, contains in itself. The 
true cause of the irrecoverable fall of Rome is to 
be found in the fact that Rome was a city, a 
handful of men that multiplied its subjects in- 
comparably faster than its citizens, so that the 
latter were soon dilute and lost in the former. 
On a similar principle colonists in modem times 
degenerate by excision from their race (the an- 
cient colonies were buds'). This, I think, ap- 
plies to the Neapolitans and most of the Italian 
states. A nest of republics keep each other 
alive ; but a patchwork of principalities has the 
effect of excision by insulation, or rather by 
compressure ! How long did the life of Ger- 
many doze under these ligatures ! Yet did we 
not despair wrongfully of the people ? The 
spirit of the race survived, of which literature 
was a part. Hence I dare not despair of Greece, 
because it has been barbarized and enslaved, but 
not split up into puny independent governments 
under princes of their own race. The Neapoli- 
tans have always been a conquered people, and 
degenerates in the original sense of the word, de 
genere — they have lost their race, though what 
it was is uncertain. Lastly, the individual in all 
things is the prerogative of the divine know- 
ledge. What it is, our eyes can see only by 
what it has in common, and this can only be 
245 



FLIGHT OF 

MOHAM- 

JIED 



ANIMA POET^ 

seen in communities where neither excision, nor 
ligature, nor commixture exists. Despotism and 
superstition will not extinguish the character of 
a race, as Russia testifies. But again, take care 
to understand that character, and exj)ect no 
other fruit than the root contains in its nature. 

THE Had I proceeded, in concert with R. Southey, 

with the " Flight and Return of Mohammed " 
[1799], I had intended to introduce a dis^juta- 
tion between Mahomet, as the representative of 
unipersonal Theism with the Judaico-Christian 
machinery of angels, genii, and proj^hets, an idol- 
ater with his gods, heroes, and spirits of the 
departed mighty, and a fetich-worshipper who 
adored the invisible alone, and held no religion 
common to all men or any number of men other 
than as they chanced at the same moment to be 
acted on by the same influence — even as when a 
hundred ant-hills are in motion under the same 
burst of sunshine. And, still, chiefly for the 
sake of the last scheme, I should like to do some- 
thing of the kind. My enlightened fetich-divine 
would have been an Okenist, a zoo-magnetist, and 
(a priest of) the night-side of Nature. 

[For the fragment entitled " Mahomet," see 
P. TF"., 1893, p. 139, and editor's Note, p. 615.] 



DENCE 
VERSUS 
FRIEND- 
SHIP 



pRu- Among the countless arguments against the 

Paleyans, state this too : Can a wise moral legis- 
lator have made 'prudence the true principle- 
ground and guide of moral conduct where in 
almost all cases in which there is contemplation 
to act wrong the first appearances of prudence 
are in favor of immorality, and, in order to 
246 



ANIMA POET^ 

ground the contrary on a principle of prudence, 
it is necessary to refine, to calculate, to look far 
onward into an uncertain future ? Is this a 
guide, or primary guide, that forever requires a 
guide against itself ? Is it not a strange system 
which sets prudence against prudence? Com- 
pare this with the Law of Conscience. Is it not 
its specific character to be immediate, positive, 
unalterable ? In short, a prioi'i, state the requi- 
sites of a moral guide, and apply them first to 
prudence, and then to the law of pure reason or 
conscience, and ask if we need fear the result if 
the Judge is pure from all bribes and prejudices. 

What then are the real dictates of prudence as 
drawn from every man's experience in late man- 
hood, and so lured from the intoxication of youth, 
hope, and love? How cold, how dead'ning, what 
a dire vacuum they would leave in the soul, if 
the high and supreme sense of duty did not 
form a root out of which new prospects budded. 
What, I say, is the clear dictate of prudence in 
the matter of friendship ? Assuredly to like only, 
and never to be so attached as to be strij^ped 
naked by the loss. A friend may be a great- 
coat, a beloved a couch, but never, never our 
necessary clothing, our only means of quiet heart- 
repose ! And, yet, with this the mind of a gen- 
erous man would be so miserable, that prudence 
itself would fight against prudence, and advise 
him to drink off the draught of Hope, spite of the 
horrid and bitter dregs of disappointment, with 
which the draught will assuredly finish. 

Though I have said that duty is a consolation, I 
have not affirmed that the scar of the wound of 
disappointed love and insulted, betrayed fidelity 
247 



ANIMA POET^ 

would be removed in this life. No ! it will not 
— nay, the very duty must forever keep alive 
feelings the appropriate objects of which are 
indeed in another world ; but yet our human na- 
ture cannot avoid at times the connection of those 
feelings with their original or their first forms 
and objects ; and so far, therefore, from removing 
the scar, will often and often make the wound 
open and bleed afresh. But, still, we know that 
the feeling is not objectless, that the counterfeit 
has a correspondent genuine, and this is the 
comfort. 

A POET ON Canzone xviii. fra le Rime di Dante is a 
poem of wild and interesting images, intended as 
an enigma, and to me an enigma it remains, spite 
of all my efforts. Yet it deserves transcription 
and translation. A. D. 1806. [? 1807.] 

" Tre donne intorno al cuor mi son venute," 
etc. 

[After the four first lines the handwriting is 
that of my old, dear, and honored friend, Mr. 
Wade of Bristol — S. T. C] 

Eamsgate, Sept. 2, 1819. I hegin to under- 
stand the above poem, after an interval from 
1805, during which no year passed in which I 
did not re-peruse, I might say construe, parse, and 
spell it twelve times, at least — such a fascination 
had it, spite of its obscurity ! It affords a good 
instance, by the bye, of that soul of universal 
significance in a true poet's composition, in addi- 
tion to the specific meaning. 

Great minds can and do create the taste of 
the age, and one of the contingent causes which 
248 



ANIMA POET^ 

warp the taste of nations and ages is, that men great 
of genius in part yield to it, and in part are li^ttle 
acted on by the taste of the age. mikds 

Common minds may be compared to the com- 
ponent drops of the stream of life — men of 
genius to the large and small bubbles. What if 
they break ? they are still as good as the rest — 
drops of water. 

In youth our happiness is hope ; in age the subject 
recollection of the hopes of youth. What else obTect 
can there be? — for the substantial mind, for 
the /, what else can there be? Pleasure? 
Fruition ? Filter hope and memory from plea- 
sure, and the more entire the fruition the more 
is it the death of the 7. A neutral product 
results that may exist for others, but no longer 
for itself — a coke or a slag. To make the 
object one with us, we must become one with 
the object — ergo^ an object. Ergo, the object 
must be itseK a subject — partially a favorite 
dog, principally a friend, wholly God, the Friend. 
God is Love — that is, an object that is abso- 
lutely subject (God is a spirit), but a subject 
that forever condescends to become the object 
for those that meet Him subjectively. [As in 
the] Eucharist, [He is] verily and truly present 
to the Faithful, neither [by a] trans nor con, 
but [by] substantiation. 



three 
estates 



We might as well attempt to conceive more the 
than three dimensions of space, as to imagine ^ 
more than three kinds of living existence — God, '^^ being 
man, and beast. And even of these the last 
249 



ANIMA POET^ 



A LIFE- 
LONG 
ERROE 



(division) is obscure, and scarce endures a fixed 
contemplation without passing into an unripe or 
degenerated humanity. 

My mother told my wife that I was a year 
younger, and that there was a blunder made 
either in the baptismal register itself or in the 
transcript sent for my admission into Christ's 
Hospital ; and Mrs. C, who is older than myself, 
believes me only 48. Be this as it may, in life^ 
if not in years, I am, alas ! nearer to 68. 

[S. T. C. was born on October 21, 1772. 
Consequently, on October 20, 1819, he was not 
yet forty-seven. He entered his forty-eighth year 
October 21, 1819.] 



AN UN- 
WRITTEN 
SONNET 



N. B. A sonnet on the child collecting shells 
and pebbles on the sea-shore or lake-side, and 
carrying each with a fresh shout of delight and ad- 
miration to the mother's apron, who smiles and 
assents to each. " This is pretty ! " " Is not 
that a nice one?" and then when the prattler 
is tired of its conchozetetic labors lifts up her 
apron and throws them out on her apron. 
Such are our first discoveries both in science 
and philosophy. — S. T. Coleridge, Oct. 21, 
1819. 



MILTON 
AND 
SHAK- 
SPERE 



Found Mr. G. with Hartley in the garden, 
attempting to explain to himself and to Hartley 
a feeling of a something not present in Milton's 
works, that is, in " Paradise Lost," " Paradise 
Regained," and " Samson Agonistes," which he 
did feel delightedly in the " Lycidas," and (as I 
added afterwards) in the Italian sonnets com- 
250 



ANIMA POET^ 



pared with the English. And this appeared to 
me to be the poet appearing and wishing to ap- 
pear as the poet, and, likewise, as the man, as 
much as, though more rare than, the father, the 
brother, the preacher, and the patriot. Compare 
with Milton, Chaucer's " Fall of the Leaf " and 
Spenser throughout, and you cannot but feel 
what Gillman meant to convey. What is the 
solution ? This, I believe — but I must premise 
that there is a synthesis of intellectual insight 
including the mental object, the organ of the 
correspondent being indivisible, and this (O 
deep truth !) because the objectivity consists in 
the universality of its subjectiveness — as when 
it sees, and millions see even so, and the seeing 
of the millions is what constitutes to A and to 
each of the millions the objectivity of the sight, 
the equivalent to a common object — a synthesis 
of this, I say, and of proper external object 
which we call fact. Now, this it is v/hich we 
find in religion. It is more than philosophical 
truth — it is other and more than historical fact ; 
it is not made up by the addition of the one to 
the other, but it is the ide7itity of both, the 
co-inherence. 

Now, this being understood, I proceed to say, 
using the term objectivity (arbitrarily, I grant), 
for this identity of truth and fact, that Milton 
hid the poetry in or transformed (not trans-sub- 
stantiated) the poetry into this objectivity, while 
Shakspere, in all things, the divine opposite or 
antithetic correspondent of the divine Milton, 
transformed the objectivity into poetry. 

Mr. G. observed as peculiar to the " Hamlet," 
that it alone, of all Shakspere's plays, presented 
251 



ANIMA POET^ 



to him a moving along hefore him ; while in 
others it was a moving, indeed, but with which 
he himself moved equally in all and with all, and 
without any external something by which the mo- 
tion was manifested, even as a man would move 
in a balloon — a sensation of motion, but not a 
sight of moving and having been moved. And 
why is this ? Because of all the characters of 
Shakspere's plays Hamlet is the only character 
with which, by contradistinction from the rest 
of the dramatis 'personm^ the fit and capable 
reader identifies himself as the representation of 
his own contemplative and strictly proper and 
very own being (action, etc., belongs to others, the 
moment we call it our own) — hence the events 
of the play, with all the characters, move because 
you stand still. In the other plays, your identity 
is equally diffused over all. Of no parts can 
you say, as in Hamlet, they are moving. But 
ever it is vne^ or that period and portion of human 
action, which is unified into a dream, even as in 
a dream the personal unity is diffused and sever- 
alized (divided to the sight though united in the 
dim feeling) into a sort of reality. Even so [it 
is with] the styles of Milton and Shaksj)ere — 
the same weight of effect from the exceeding 
felicity (subjectively) of Shakspere, and the ex- 
ceeding propriety (extra arhitriurn) of Milton. 



A ROYAL 
ROAD TO 
KNOW- 
LEDGE 



The best plan, I think, for a man who would 
wish his mind to continue growing is to find, in 
the first place, some means of ascertaining for 
himself whether it does or no ; and I can think 
of no better than early in life, say after three 
and twenty, to procure gradually the works of 
252 



ANIMA POET^ 

some two or three great writers — say, for in- 
stance, Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, and Kant, with 
the De Republican De Legihus, the Sophistes, 
and Politicus of Plato, and the Poetics, Rhet- 
orics, and Politics of Aristotle — and amidst all 
other reading, to make a point of re-perusing 
some one, or some weighty part of some one, 
of these every four or five years, having from 
the beginning a separate notebook for each 
of these writers, in which your impressions, 
suggestions, conjectures, doubts, and judgments 
are to be recorded with date of each, and so 
worded as to represent most sincerely the exact 
state of your convictions at the time, such as 
they woidd be if you did not (which this plan 
will assuredly make you do sooner or later) an- 
ticijjate a change in them from increase of know- 
ledge. " It is possible that I am in the wrong, 
but so it now appears to me, after my best at- 
tempts ; and I must therefore put it down in 
order that I may find myseK so, if so I am." It 
would make a little volume to give in detail all 
the various moral as well as intellectual ad- 
vantages that would result from the systematic 
observation of the plan. Diffidence and hope 
would reciprocally balance and excite each other. 
A continuity would be given to your being, and 
its progressiveness ensured. All your knowledge 
otherwise obtained, whether from books or con- 
versation or experience, would find centres round 
which it woidd organize itself. And, lastly, the 
habit of confuting your past self, and detecting 
the causes and occasions of your having mis- 
taken or overlooked the truth, will give you both 
a quickness and a winning kindness, resulting 
253 



ANIMA POET^ 

from sympathy, in exposing tlie errors of others, 
as if you were an altei' egOy of his mistake. And 
such, indeed, will your antagonist appear to you, 
another past self — in all points in which the 
falsity is not too plainly a derivation from a cor- 
rupt heart and the predominance of bad passion 
or worldly interests overlaying the love of truth 
as truth. And even in this case the liveliness 
with which you will so often have exjDressed your- 
self in your private notebooks, in which the 
words, unsought for and untrimmed because in- 
tended for your own eye exclusively, were the 
first-born of your first impressions, when you were 
either enkindled by admii^ation of your writer, or 
excited by a humble disputing with him, reimper- 
sonated in his book, will be of no mean rhetorical 
advantage to you, especially in public and extem- 
porary debate or animated conversation. 

THE Did you deduce your own being ? Even that 

GOD is less absurd than the conceit of deducing the 

Divine being ? Never would you have had the 
notion, had you not had the idea — rather, had 
not the idea worked in you like the memory of a 
name which we cannot recollect and yet feel that 
we have, and which reveals its existence in the 
mind only by a restless anticipation, and proves 
its a priori actuality by the almost explosive in- 
stantaneity with which it is welcomed and recog- 
nized on its reemersion out of the cloud, or its 
re-ascent from the horizon of consciousness. 

APHOR- I should like to know whether, or how far the 

ADAGES delight I feel, and have always felt, in adages or 
aphorisms of universal or very extensive appli- 
254 



ANIMA POET.E 

cation is a general or common feeling with men, 
or a peculiarity of my own mind. I cannot de- 
scribe how much pleasure I have derived from 
" Extremes meet," for instance, or " Treat every- 
thing according to its nature," and, the last, 
" Be " ! In the last I bring all inward rectitude 
to its test, in the foimer all outward morality to 
its rule, and in the first all problematic results 
to their solution, and reduce apparent contraries 
to correspondent opposites. How many hostile 
tenets has it enabled me to contemplate as frag- 
ments of truth, false only by negation and mu- 
tual exclusion ? 

I have myself too often of late used the ignore 
phrase " rational self-love " the same as " en- j„]y 12, 
lightened self-love." O no more of this ! What ^^^'^ 
have love, reason, or light to do with self, except 
as the dark and evil spirit which it is given 
to them to overcome ! Soul-love, if you please. 
O there is more stuff of thought in our simple 
and pious fore-elders' adjuration, " Take pity of 
your poor soul ! " than in all the volumes of 
Paley, Rochefoucauld, and Helvetius ! 



LEO 



N. B. The injurious manner in which men eugit 
of genius are treated, not only as authors, but 
even when they are in social company. A is be- 
lieved to be, or talked of as, a man of unusual 
talent. People are anxious to meet him. If he 
says little or nothing, they wonder at the report, 
never considering whether they themselves were 
fit either to excite, or if self-excited to receive 
and comprehend him. But with the simplicity 
of genius he attributes more to them than they 
255 



ANIMA POET^ 

have, and they put questions that cannot be 
answered but by a return to first principles, and 
then they complain of him as not conversing, but 
lecturing. " He is quite intolerable," " Might 
as well be hearing a sermon." In short, in an- 
swer to some objection, A replies, " Sir, this 
rests on the distinction between an idea and an 
image^ and, likewise, its difference from a per- 
fect conception.^ ^ " Pray, sir, explain." Be- 
cause he does not and cannot [state the case as 
concisely as if he had been appealed to about a 
hand at] whist, 't is, " Lord ! how long he talks," 
and they never ask themselves. Did this man 
force himself into your company? Was he not 
dragged into it ? What is the practical result ? 
That the man of genius should live as much as 
possible with beings that simply love him, from 
relationship or old association, or with those that 
have the same feelings with himself ; but in all 
other company he will do well to cease to be the 
man of genius, and make up his mind to appear 
dull or commonplace as a companion, to be the 
most silent except upon the most trivial subjects , 
of any in the company, to turn off questions 
with a joke or a pun as not suiting a wine-table, 
and to trust only to his writings. 

A BROKEN Few die of a hrohen hearty and these few (the 
surgeons tell us) know nothing of it, and, dying 
suddenly, leave to the dissector the first discov- 
ery. O this is but the shallow remark of a hard 
and unthinking prosperity ! Have you never 
seen a stick broken in the middle, and yet coher- 
ing by the rind ? The fibres, half of them actu- 
ally broken and the rest sprained and, though 
256 



HEART 



ANIMA POET^ 

tough, unsustalning ? O many, many are the 
broken-hearted for those who know what the 
moral and practical heart of the man is ! 

Now the breeze through the stiff and brittle- 
becoming foliage of the trees counterfeits the 
sound of a rushing st.-eam or water-flood suddenly 
sweeping by. The sigh, the modulated continu- 
ousness of the murmur, is exchanged for the con- 
fusion of overtaking sounds — the self -evolution 
of the One for the clash or stroke of ever-com- 
mencing contact of the multitudinous, without 
interspace, by confusion. The short gusts rustle, vox 
and the ear feels the unlithesome dryness before Thursday 
the eye detects the coarser, duller, though deeper ^^.p*- '^^^ 
green, deadened and not [yet] awakened into 
the hues of decay — echoes of spring from the 
sepulchral vault of winter. The aged year, con- 
versant with the forms of its youth and forget- 
ting all the intervals, feebly reproduces them, 
[as it were, from] memory. 

" Constancy lives in realms above." This cox- 
exclusion of constancy from the list of earthly Friday, 
virtues may be a poet's exaggeration, but, cer- ^^^q ^' 
tainly, it is of far rarer occurrence in all rela- 
tions of life than the young and warm-hearted 
are willing to believe, but in cases of exclusive 
attachment (that is, in Love, properly so-called, 
and yet distinct from Friendship), and in the 
highest form of the Virtue, it is so rare that I 
cannot help doubting whether an instance of 
mutual constancy in effect ever existed. For 
there are two sorts of constancy : the one neg- 
ative, where there is no transfer of affection, 
257 



ANIMA POET^ 

where the bond of attaeliment is not broken 
though it may be attenuated to a thread — this 
may be met with, not so seldom, and where 
there is goodness of heart it may be expected; 
but the other sort, or jyositive constancy, where 
the affection endures in the same intensity with 
the same or increased tenderness and nearness, 
of this it is that I doubt whether once in an age 
an instance occurs where A feels it toward £, 
and B feels it towards A, and vice versa. 

FLOWERS Spring flowers, I have observed, look best in 
LIGHT t^6 day, and by sunshine ; but summer and autum- 
Aprii 18, jjg^j flower-pots by lamp or candle light. I have 
now before me a flower-pot of cherry blossoms, 
polyanthuses, double violets, periwinkles, wall- 
flowers, but how dim and dusky they look. The 
scarlet anemone is an exception, and three or 
four of them with all the rest of the flower-glass 
sprays of white blossoms, and one or two peri- 
winkles for the sake of the dark green leaves, 
green stems, and flexible elegant form, make a 
lovely group both by sun and by candle light. 

THE Grove, Highgate. 

oF*^ What an interval ! Heard the singing birds 

Fb''28 ^^^^ morning in our garden for the first time 

1827 this year, though it rained and blew fiercely ; 

but the long frost has broken up, and the wind, 

though fierce, was warm and westerly. 

THE IDEA To the right understanding of the most 

May'5^ awfully concerning declaration of Holy Writ 

1^27 there has been no greater obstacle than the want 

of insight into the nature of Life — what it is, 

258 



ANIMA POET^ 

and wliat it Is not. But in order to this, the 
mind must have been raised to the contemplation 
of the Idea — the life celestial, to wit — or the 
distinctive essence and character of the Holy 
Spirit. Here Life is Love — communicative, 
outpouring love. Ergo, the terrestrial or the 
Life of Nature ever the shadow and opposite of 
the Divine is appropriate, absorbing ap^oetence. 
But the great mistake is, that the soul cannot 
continue without life ; for, if so, with what pro- 
priety can the portion of the reprobate soul be 
called Death? What if the natural life have 
two possible terminations — true Being, and the 
falling back into the dark Will ? 

The painter parson, Rev. Mr. Judkin, is about a com- 
to show off a Romish priest converted to the sive fok- 
Protestant belief, on Sunday next at his church, ^^^^ 
and asked of me (this day, at Mr. Gray's, Friday, 
27th July, 1827) whether I knew of any form 
of recantation but that of Archbishop Tenison. 
I knew nothing of Tenison's or any other, but 
expressed my opinion that no other recantation 
ought to be required than a declaration that he 
admitted no outward authority superior to, or 
coordinate with, the canonical Scriptures, and 
no interpreter that superseded or stood in the 
place of the Holy Spirit, enlightening the mind 
of each true believer, according to his individual 
needs. I can conceive a person holding all the 
articles that distinguish the Romish from the 
Protestant conception, with this one exception ; 
and, yet, if he did make this exception, and pro- 
fessed to believe them, because he thought they 
were contained in, or to be fairly inferred from, 
259 



ANIMA POET^ 

right reason and the Scriptures, I should con- 
sider him as true a Protestant as Luther, Knox, 
or Calvin, and a far better than Laud and his 
compeers, however meanly I might think of him 
as a philosopher and theologian. The laying so 
great a stress on transubstantiation I have long 
regarded as the great calamity or error of the 
Reformation — if not constrained by circum- 
stances, the great error — or, if constrained, the 
great calamity. 



THE 

NIGHT IS 
AT HAND 

August 1, 

1828 



The sweet prattle of the chimes — counsellors 
pleading in the court of Love — then the clock, 
the solemn sentence of the mighty Judge — long 
pause between each pregnant, inappellable word, 
too deeply weighed to be reversed in the High- 
Justice-Court of Time and Fate. A more richly 
solemn sound than this el^en o'clock at Ant- 
werp I never heard — dead enough to be opaque 
as central gold, yet clear enough to be the moun- 
tain air. 

260 



INDEX OF PROPER NAMES 



Abergavenny, the, 112. 

Achilles, 21, 

Adam, 42. 

Adar River, 221. 

Africa, 59, 60. 

Alexander the Great, 217. 

Alfieri, 194. 

Allen, Robert, 118. 

Allston, Washington, 141, 148. 

Anacreon, 155, 223. 

Antonio, St., 65. 

Antwerp, 260. 

Aphrodite, 162. 

Apollo, 93. 

Ariosto, 128, 194. 

Aristotle, 155, 187, 227, 253. 

Arne, 228. 

Arrian, 155. 

Augustine, St., 151. 

Bacon, F. (Lord Verulam), 17, 

67, 128, 150, 155, 253. 
Ball, Sir Alexander, 174. 
BaU, Lady, 77. 
Barrow. J., 21, 39. 
Bassenthwaite, 15. 
Barclay, W. (" Argenis "), 175. 
Beaumont, Francis, 175. 
Beaumont, Sir George, 57, 67, 

123. 
Beaumont, Lady, 56. 
Beddoes, Thomas, M. D., 201. 
Bentham, 108. 
Berkeley, Bishop, 155. 
Bernard, St., 231. 
Bernouilli, 128. 
Beverly, Robert, 80. 
Blackmore, 20, 228. 
Blount, Sir Edward, 53. 
Blumenbach, 57. 
Boccaccio, 38. 
-Bonnet, 128. 
Borrowdale, 28, 29, 43. 
Bosc, 155. 
Boyer, J., 38. 
Brandelhow, 38. 
Bristol, 248. 
Brunck, 155. 
Brougham, Lord, 212. 



Brown, Dr. J., 12. index of 

Browne, William, 133. proper 

Bruno, Giordano, 13, 14, 60, 61, names 

128. 
Buffon, 177. 
Buonaparte, 63. 
Bui-dett. Sir F., 147, 216. 
. Burton, Robert, 20. 

Cain 42. 

Cairns, Mr. J., 8. 
Calvin, 260. 
Cambridge, 180. 
CampbeU, T., 132. 
Campeachy, Bay of, 175. 
Caracciolo, 73. 
Caernarvon Castle, 60. 
Castle Crag, 28. 
Castlerigg, 36. 
Catidlus, 140. 
Ceciha, St., 169. 
Ceres, 93. 
Cervantes, 128. 
Chantrey, 242. 
Charlemagne, 144. 
Chartreuse, 101. 
Chaucer, 251. 
China, 23, 112, 128. 
Christ's Hospital, 38, 250. 
Cicero, 18. 
, Circe, 162. 
Clarkson, Thomas, 19. 
Clarkson, Mrs., 142. 
iClaudian, 139. 
Clotharius, 178. 
Cobbett, W., 64, 216. 
Cochrane (Earl of Dundonald), 

200. 
Coleorton, 144. 
Coleridge, Berkeley, 101. 
Coleridge, Derwent, 15, 24, 101. 
Coleridge, Hartley, 3, 11, 13, 

19, 33, 34, 55, 81, 115, 250. 
Coleridge, Colonel James, 133. 
Coleridge, S. T., 7, 18, 54, 63, 

87, 118, 132-134, 143, 150, 172, 

173, 179, 205, 250. 
Coleridge, Sara (Mrs. S. T. 

Coleridge), 7, 184, 250. 

261 



INDEX OF PROPER NAMES 



INDEX OF Coleridge, Sara (Mrs. H. N. 
PROPER Coleridge), 101, 176. 

NAMES Collins, 4. 

Combe, St., 109. 

Combe Satchfield, 133. 

CondUlac, 67. 

Constantine, Budseo - Tusan, 
150. 

Cordova, 243. 

Cottle, Joseph, .50, 73, 198, 

Courier office, 163, 172. 

Cowper, William, 103, 108. 

Cuthill, Mr., 154, 155. 

Dampier, Travels of, 175. 
.U^ante, 20, 128, 194, 248. 
Darwin, Dr., 2, 3, 78, 128, 236. 
Davy, Sir H., 184. 
Dennison, Mr., 122, 123. 
De Quincey, 150, 155. 
Diogenes, 82. 
Domitian, 134. 
D'OrviUe, 155. 
Drayton, 130. 
Dresden, 72. 
Dry den, 134. 
Duke Richard, 133. 
Dundas (Lord Melville), 128. 
Duns Scotus, 187. 
Durham, 29. 
Dyer, George, 7 n., 56. 

Edgeworth, Miss, 99. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 195. 

Empedocles, 138. 

Epictetus, 155. 

Erigena, Joannes Scotus, 48. 

Escot, i:i2. 

Etna, 97. 

Euphormio, 175. 

Exeter, 56. 

Favell, 22. 
Fay, Benedict, 130. 
, F^nelon, 113. 
Fichte, 89, 112, 143, 155. 
Fielding, 141. 
Flaminius, 175, 222. 
Fletcher, John, 175. 
Fraeastorius, 125, 175, 222. 
France, 63, 108, 128. 

Geddes, Dr. Alexander, 92. 
Geneva, Lake of, 221. 
Genoa, 5. 
Germany, 6, 127, 128, 143, 241, 

245. 
Gibbon, 230. 

GiUman, James, 250, 251. 
Gillman, Mrs., 231. 
Glanvillians, the, 238. 



Godwin, W., 11, 37, 57. 
Goethe, 194. 
Gottingen, 57. 
Grasmere, 64, 112. 
Gray, Thomas, 4, 228. 
Greece, 93, 150, 174, 245. 
Greenough, 57. 
Greta River, 16, 24, 35, 36. 
Greta Hall, 184. 
GreviUe, Fulk, 14. 
Grysdale Pike, 16, 39. 
Guarini, 161. 
Guyon, Madame, 113, 128. 

Haarlem, 56. 

Halim II., 243. 

Hamburg, 85. 

Harrington, J., 67, 128. 

Hartz, 17.S, 179, 

Hayley, 128. 

HazUtt, W., 8, 29, 30. 

Hebrides, 109. 

Helvellyn, 43, 

Helvetius, 255. 

Henry, Prince, 133. 

Herbert's, St., Island, 26. 

Hobbes, 11, 155. 

Holcroft, 56, 57. 

Homer, 175, 228. 

Horace, 149. 

Hume, David, 20, 67, 86, 128, 

230. 
Huss, 182. 
Hutchinson, Mary (Mrs. 

Wordsworth), 7, 16. 
Hutchinson, Sarah, 7. 

India, 112. 
Ireland, 150. 
Italy, 128, 193, 194. 

Java, 229. 

Jennings, J., 50. 

Johnson, Dr., 97, 98, 128, 131, 

230. 
Jonson, Ben, 175. 
Judkin, Rev. Mr., 259. 

Kant, 10, 89, 128, 143, 155. 
Keswick, 45, 85. 
Klopstock, 85, 194. 
Knox, John, 139, 260. 

Lamb, Charles, 56, 118. 
Latrigg, 50. 
Laud, 260. 
Lavater, 188. 
Leckie, 155. 
Leibnitz, 124, 128, 155. 
Leighton, 243. 
Lessing, 128. 



262 



INDEX OF PROPER NAJVIES 



Linnaeus, 227. 
Lloyd, Charles, 91, 
Lloyd, David, 194. 
Locke, 20, 128, 131, 155, 157. 
Loch Leven, 176. 
Lodore, 28. 
London, 7, 23, 194. 
Lorraine, Claude, 242. 
Lupus, 178. < 

Luther, 9, 128, 182, 201, 260. 
Lyceum, 162. 
Lyonnet, 80. 

Mackintosh, Sir J., 5, 107, 167. 

Malone, E., 74, 75. 

Malta, 63, 70, 73, 83, 88, 91, 110, 

118, 122, 158, 166. 
Malthus, Rev. J., 54. 
Marathon, 62. 
Marini, G. B., 161. 
Martial, 134. 
Massmger, 175. 
Mediterranean, 72, 92. 
Metastasio, 140, 193. 
Middleton, Sir Hugh, 212. 
Milton, 12, 20,61, 101, 128, 134, 

136, 181, 193, 214, 230, 250- 

252. 
-Mohammed, 246. 
Moli^re, 128. 
Montagu, Basil, 184. 
Moses, 227. 
Mylius, Johann Christoph, 31. 

Naples, King of, 72. 
Naucratius, 17. 
Nelson, Lord, 200. 
Newlands, 43. 
Newmarket, 142. 
New River, 209. 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 180. 
Nile, 17. 
Norway, 241. 

Okenist, an, 246. 
Orleans, Bishop of, 178. 
Otter River, 24. 
Otterton, 133. 
Ottery, St. Mary, 24, 133. 
Ovid, 140. 

Paine, Thomas, 191. 

Paley, Archdeacon, 29, 128, 

131, 224, 255. 
Paracelsus, 12, 196. 
Parisatis, 149. 
Parkinson (Theatrum Botani- 

cum), 49. 
Pascal, 128. 

Pasley, Captain, 122, 130. 
Paul, Jean (Richter), 198. 



Paul, St., 79, 138. index ob' 

Penelope, Nature a, 84. pkoper 

Peter, St., 181. names 

Petrarch, 221, 222. 

Picts, the, 109. 

Pindar, 142. 

Pitt, 128. 
-Plato, 25, 112, 155, 253. 

Plotinus, 40, 41, 155. 

Polyclete, 162. 

Poole, T., 59, 130. 

Pope, 128, 140, 197. 

Porphyry, 155. 

Port Royal, 175. 

Porte, the, 245. 

Price, Dr., 142. 

Priestley, Dr., 128, 131. 

Prince, the Black, 60. 
. Proclus, 14, 52, 155. 
/Proserpine, 93. 
.Psyche, 75, 92, 93, 120. 

Pygmalion, 162. 

Pyramids, the, 219. 

Quintilian, 18. 

Raleigh, Sir W., 125, 212. 

Raphael, 242. 

Ray (or Wray), John, 29. 

Reigiiia, Captain. 75. 

Reimarus, Herman Samuel, 77. • 

Rhone, the, 221. 

Richardson, Samuel, 140, 141. 

Rickman, J., 56. 

Robertson, William, 230. 

Rochefoucauld, 255. 

Rogers, Samuel, 132. 

Rome, Church of, 48, 105, 181, 

182. 
Rome, 93, 174, 245. 
Russia, 143, 245. 

Scapula, 154. 

Scarlett (James Lord Abinger), 

167. 
Schelling, 143, 155. 
SchiUer, 127, 136 ; his Wallen- 

stein, 153, 178, 194. 
Scott, Sir Walter, 62. 
Sens, 178. 
Shakspere, 17, 20, 60, 61, 74, 

75, 82, 92, 97, 108, 125, 127, 

128, 136, 153, 243, 251, 252. 
Sharp, Granville, 211. 
Sharp, Eichard, 167. 
Sheridan, R. B., 34, 150. 
Shield, 228. 

Sidney, Sir Philip, 14, 128. 
Simonides, 138. 
Skiddaw, 15, 16, 43. 
Smith, Robert, 167, 



263 



INDEX OF PROPER NAMES 



INDEX OF Smith, Sydney, 167. 
PROPER Sorel, Dr., 91. 
NAMES Sotheby, William, 44. 

South, 39. 

Southey, 5, 23, 30, 91, 134, 
246. 

Spain, 59, 128, 243, 244. 

Spenser, 251. 

Spinoza, 48, 68, 155. 

Staunton, Sir G., 229. 

Stephen's, St., 178. 

Stephen's Thesaurus, 154. 

Stewart, Sir James, 1. 

Stoddart (Dr., afterwards 
J.), 62, 63, 91, 118, 141. 

Stowey, Upper, 121. 

Stowey, Nether, 50. 

Strabo Geographicus, 152. 

Strada, Prolusions of, 155. 

Strozzi, Giambattista, 190. 

Stuart, Daniel, 165. 

Sweden, 241. 
, Swedenborg, 242. 

Swift, Dean, 20, 128, 139. 

Swinside, 16. 

Switzerland, 109. 

Syracuse, 80. 

Taylor, Dorothy, 133. 
Taylor, Frances, 133. 
Taylor, Jeremy, 10, 253. 
-Taylor, Thomas, 14. 
Teme, valley of, 21. 
Tenison, Archbishop, 259. 
Theodorus Chersites, 17. 
Theophrastus, 227. 
Tiberius, 30. 
TibuUus, 140. 



Tobin, J., 58, 118. 
Tyrol, the, 241. 

Underwood, Mr., 57. 
187, Uuzer, D., 79. 

Valetta, 63, 122. 
Van Huysum, 242. 
Varrius, 113. 
Vida, 222. 

Vincent, Captain, 114. 
Virgil, 223. 
Voltaire, 128. 
Sir Voss, 128. 194. 
Vossius, 113. 

Wade, Mr., 248. 
Wedgwood, T., 22, 77. 
Whiidatter, 39, 42. 
White, Mr. (of Clare Hall, 

Camb.), 190. 
Wickliffe, 182. 
,Wieland, 194. 
Wilberforce, 212. 
WiUoughby, Lord, 195. 
Wilson, John, 50. 
Windybrow, 50. 
Withop Fells, 39. 
WoUstonecraft, Mary, 56. 
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 50. 
Wordsworth, John, 111, 112. 
-Wordsworth, William, 3, 8, 24, 

25, 29, 50, 59, 60, 67, 85, 110, 

116, 124, 128, 138, 143, 144, 

175, 176, 187, 213. 
Wyndham, 34, 200. 

I Zinzendorf, 242. 

264 



INDEX OF SUBJECTS 



Accident, a curious, 98. 

Adages. 254, 255. 

Adhcesit pavimenio cor, 118. 

Advice, blunt, 58, 59. 

Affection, 225. 

Alas ! they had been friends in 

youth, 52. 
" AH thoughts, all passions, all 

delights," 189. 
Analogy, 76, 77. 
"Anecdote," a genuine, 184. 
Anecdotes, a sheaf of, 56, 57. 
Animals, the instincts of, 78- 

80. 
Anonymity, 241. 
Anthropomorphism, 11. 
Anticipations in nature and in 

thought, 115. 
Anti-optimism, 11. 
Aphorisms and adages, 254. 
Aphorisms, or pithy sentences, 

214. 
Apology for Cottle, an, 73. 
Apparitions, 2o5, 236. 
Araneosis, 97. 

Architecture and climate, 164. 
"Ascend a step in choosing a 

friend," Talmud, 134. 
Ash-trees, 16. 
Asleep, falling, 22, 23. 
Association, liM), 191. 
As the sparks fly upward, 93. 
Atheism, 242. 
Atmosphere, 149. 
Attention, 180. 
Attention and sensation, 109. 
Auri sacra fames, 37. 
Author, a conscientious, 186. 
A ve Phcebe Imperator, 52. 

Babes, 10, 37, 231. 

Bat, 6. 

Beast, 249. 

Beauty, 41. 

Beggar's Petition, The, 228. 

Bells, concerning, 178, 179. 

Bibliological memoranda, 154. 

Bird, the captive, 163, 164. 

Blank verse, Milton's, 214. 



Blind Highland Boy, The, by index of 

Wordsworth, 175, 176. subjects 

Blindness, 228, 229. 
Bliss to be alive, a, 223. 
Body of this death, the, 233. 
Book, of a too witty, 237. 
Book-learning for legislators, 

241. 
Books, 77, 102, 109, 110, 154, 

155, 216, 217, 252-254. 
Books in the air, 175. 
Botanical Garden, Darwin's, 

237. 
Bramble arch, a, 50. 
Bulls of action, 131, 
,Butterfly, 75, 120. 



Calf. 24. 

Candle, 86. See Taper. 

Candor another name for cant, 

(i3. 
"Cast not your pearls before 

swine," 67. 
Casuistry, 105. 
Cataract, a, 243. 
Catholicism, 77, 78, 105, 121, 

259, 260. 
Catholic reunion, 181. 
Cattle, 179. 

Caution to posterity, a, 134. 
Cest inagrufique, mats ce n^est 

pas la poesie, 218. 
Cherry-stone, a carved, 72. 
Chestnut-tree, the, 139. 
Children, 81, 191, 192. 
Children of a larger growth, 

172. 
Chimes, 260. 

Chrislahel, 19 ; a hint for, 189. 
Christianity, 165, 195, 219, 220, 

244. 
Church and state, 15. 
Chymical analogies, 172. 
Circle, the, 82, 83. 
Clerical errors, the psychology 

of, 153. 
Climate, 164. 
Clock, a, 260. 
Clouds, 71, 106. 



265 



INDEX OF SUBJECTS 



INDEX OF Clove-tree, 196. 
SUBJECTS Coal, burning, 143. 
Co-arctation, 13(5. 
Cogitare est laborare, 55. 
Communicable, the, 26. 
Comparisons and contrasts, 4- 

6. 
Compassion, 239. 
Complex vexation, a, 240. 
Compreliensive fornnxla, 259. 
Conclusion of the whole matter, 

the, 225. 
Conscience, 177, 247. 
Conscience and immortality, 

170. 
Constancy, 257. 
Contingent and transitory 

things, 60-62. 
Convalescence, 215. 
Conversation, 21, 66, 67, 255, 

256. 
Conversation, his, a nimiety of 

ideas, not of words, 87. 
Correspondence, neglected, 54. 
Corruptis optimi pessima, 77, 

223. 
Country and town, 23. 
Courts of Admiralty, 98. 
Creation, 4<S. 
Criticism, 24, 141, 1S8. 
Critics, poets as, 108 ; imma- 
ture, 108. 
Crowd of thoughts, a, 49-51. 

Daisy, 6. 

Dandelion, 8, 9. 

Dangers of adapting truth to 
the minds of the vulgar, the, 
192. 

Deaf and dumb, the, 233, 
234. 

Death, 100, 128, 129, 138, 202. 

Death, early, 37. 

Death, the realization of, 118. 

Death of Adam, the, 42. 

Deism, 244. 

Demagogues, 165. 

Denying, 124. 

Destiny, 111. 

Devil, the, with a memory the 
first sinner, 137 ; 183 ; a re- 
cantation. 219. 

Dewdrops, 5, 159. 

Differences, 21. 

Distemper's worst calamity, 
106. 

Distinction in union, 156. 

Document humain, a, 142. 

Doubtful experiment, a, 47. 

Doubt to faith, tlirough, 72, 

Draw, learning to, 57. 



'Dreams, 24, 33, 34, 38, 42, 
46, 71, 99, 101, 106, 107, 113, 
137. 

Dreams and shadows, 146. 

Drink, strong, 16. 

Drip, drip, drip, drip, 224, 

Duellmg, 132. 

Duty, 54, 55, 112, 117-120, 176. 

Duty and experience, 2. 

Duty and self-interest, 110. 

Eagle, the, 243, 

Earwig, 79. 

Easter, the northern, 117. 

Eating, good, and strong drink, 
16. 

Edinburgh Eeview, The, 186. 

Education, of, 191. 

Eel, an, 229. 

Ego, the, 12. 

Egotism, 11, 12. 

Elegies, 1-33. 

Elegi/ in a Country Churchyard, 
by Gray, 22.S. 

Empyrean, the, 106. 

English, 230. 

English artisans, 97. 

Enthusiasm, 117. 

Entomology versus ontology, 
79. 

Epigram, a divine, 231, 

Eternity, 131, 243. 

Ethics of Spinoza, the, 48. 

Etymology, 104. 

Evil, the origin of, 30-35 ; pro- 
duces evil. 111. 

Experience and book know- 
ledge, 109. 

External solace, his need of, 
141. 

Extremes meet, 43, 157, 255. 

Eyes, 5, 126. 

Face, a phantom of the, 45. 

Faces, two, 149, 150. 

Facts, 125. 

Facts and fiction, 03. 

Faith, 72, 152, 1S7. 

Falling from us, vaniahings, 

152. 
Feelings, 15. 
Fields, green, 20. 
Fig, an Indian, 150. 
Final causes, 73. 
Finite and infinite, 30-33, 68, 

69. 
Fire, reflection of, 45 ; 99. 
First thoughts and friendship, 

213. 
Fixed stars of truth, the, 217. 
Flame, 84, 93, 94. 



266 



INDEX OF SUBJECTS 



Flight and Beturn of Moham- 
med, The, 246. 

Flower, the, 84. 

Flowers and light, 258. 

Flowers of speech, 227. 

Form and feeling, 86. 

Fountain, a, 121. 

Free Version of the Psalms, 
Cottle's, 198. 

French language and poeLy, 
the, 100. 

Friend, a former, 52. 

Friend, The, 177, 180, 187, 195. 

Friends, 98, and note, 134. 

Friendship, 19, 143, 198, 213, 
247, 257. 

Frogs, a. 

Funeral songs, 133. 

Gambling, 142. 

Gem of morning, a, 159. 

Genius, 152, 196 ; the man of, 
255, 256. 

Genius, his ovm, 167. 

Gentleman, the country, 241. 

Gentle mail'' s Diary, 8. 

German, 159. 

Ghosts, 123, 238. 

Gnats, 229. 

God, 30-35, 41, 48, 65, 78, 79, 
108, 112, 113, 117, 183-185, 
218, 242, 249, 254. 

Gods and goddesses, conversion 
of the, 93. 

Good, the, 41. 

Gratitude, 6. 

Greater damnation, the, 236. 

Great men the criterion of na- 
tional worth, 127. 

Great unknown, the, 241. 

Grief, time an element of, 26. 

Habits, 191, 192. 

Hail and farewell, 184. 

Half-way house, the, 165. 

Hamlet, 251, 252. 

Happiness, 2. 

Happiness made perfect, 120. 

Health, independence, and 

friendship, 210. 
Heart, a broken, 256. 
Heaviness may endure for a 

night, 202. 
Heroes, 174. 
Hesperus, 209- 
Hinc ilia marginalia, 77. 
Hope, 177, 240, 249. 
Hope of humanity, the, 116. 
Hospitator, a, 57. 
House of Commons, the, 136. 
Humble-bee, the, 243. 



267 



Humble complaint of the index of 
lover, the, 161. subjects 

Humnnng-moth, the, 243. 
Hypocrisy, 177. 
Hypothesis, of a new, 89. 

Idea, the birth of an, 92. 

Idealism and superstition, 234. 

Ignore thyself, 255. 

Illusion, 122. 

Imagination, verbal, 21 ; 199. 

Immortality, 138, 170, 171. 

In a twinkling of the eye, 157. 

Incommunicable, the, 25. 

Infancy and infants, 2, 3. 

Infinity, 30-33. 

Innocence, 37, 118, 119, 173. 

Inopette me cojjia fecit, KiO. 

Insects, 44, 229. 

Instability and stability, 15, 16. 

Instincts, 81. 

Intellectual purgatory, an. 128. 

Intolerance of converts, the, 62. 

Inward light, the, 4(i. 

In wonder all philosophy be- 
gan, 157- 

Islamism, the literary sterility 
of, 243. 

I Avill lift up mine eyes to the 
hills, 85. 

Jacobins, French, 12. 

'•' Kingdom - of - heavenite.'' a, 
231. 

Kingfisher, 6, 

Kings, 149. 

Kite, a, ."9, 40. 

Knowledge, and understand- 
ing, 147; a royal road to, 
252-254. 

Landing-places, 132. 

Land of bliss, a, 243. 

Language, 11, 80. 

Lark, an old, 188. 

Law and gosi>el, 181. 

Learners, slow, 64. 

Legislators, 241. 

Libellulidie, 229. 

Liberty, 5. 

Liberty, the cap of, 172. 

Life, 156, 208, 258. 

Lifelong error, a, 250. 

Likenesses and differences, 21. 

Limbo, 18. 

Lines, S3. 

Lines to Mrs. Unwin, by Cow- 

per, l(i3._ 
Littera scripta manet, 102. 
Love, 1, 2, 17 ; the adolescence 



INDEX OF SUBJECTS 



INDEX OF 
SUBJECTS 



of, 57 ; the div'ne essence, I Mystery, a, 177. 
112 ; and duty. US; 151, 15(5, ! Mythology, 121. 



Kil ; the ineffable, 1()2 ; and 
Music, 169 ; 189, 197 ; inde- 
structible, 212 ; 257. 

Lovers, 49, 159. 

Loves, of first, 129. 

Lucus a non lucendo, 169. 

Ludicrous, the, 7. 

Maddening rain, the, 130. 

Magnitude, the sense of, 95-97. 

Maiden's primer, the, 165. 

Malice, 5. 

Mameluke, a, 174. 

Man, a period, in the life of a, 

165, 1(J6; 172, 214; a de- 
praved old, 230, 231. 
Man 's a man for a' that, a, 42. 
Many and the one, the, 65. 
Marriage, 135, 182, 199. 
Materialists, 11. 
Mathematics, 195. 
Mean, the dang-er of the, 51. 
Means to ends, 90. 
Memory, ()6. 
Metaphysic, the aim of his, 35, 

a defence of, 43. 
Metaphysician at bay, the, 90. 
Metaphysics, 2, 19, 157, 195, 

232, 233. 
Methodism, 21. 
Michael, by Wordsworth, 116. 
Minds, great and little, 249. 
Mind's eye, the, 242. 
Ministers, government, 200. 
Minute criticism, 141. 
Miracles, 170, 171. 
Miseries and misery, 2. 
Misfortunes, 2. 
Mohammedanism, 243, 244. 
Moment and a magic mirror, 

a, 208. 
Monition, the rage for, 58, 59. 
Moon, 10, 15, 36, 49, 52, 64, 95, 

106. 
Moonlight gleams and massy 

glories, 144. 
Moon-rainbows, 16. 
Moon set, a, 42. 
Moon's halo an emblem of 

hope, the, 240. 
Mother-wit, 191. 
Motion, the psychology of, 47 ; 

157. 
Moiintains, 16, 24, 25, 28, 37, 

85, 96, 97. 
Multum in parvo, T2. 
Music, 135, 169, 170. 
My Larh/s Handkerchief, 7. 
Mysterious, the, 11. 



Myxine, the, 229. 

Name it and you break it, 167. 
Nature, 115, 208, 209, 233. 
Nautilus, 79. 
Nazarites, 8. 
Necessity, 2. 

Nefas est ab hoste doceri, 64, 
Neither bond nor free, 165. 
Ne quid nimis, 75. 
Night, 35-39, 42, 52. 
Nightingales, 6. 
Night is at hand, the, 260. 
Nightmare, 166, 20(). 
Night side of nature, the, 37. 
Northern lights, 15. 
Noscitur a sociis, 27. 
Notebooks, 253, 254. 
Not the beautiful but the good, 
41. 

Ohducta fronte senectus, 230. 
Objects, 249. 
Obligations, 16. 
Observations and reflections. 

14-17. 
October, bright, 28. 
Odes, 142. 
Official distrust, 70. 
Omniscient the comforter, the, 

108. 
One and the good, the, 52. 
" One music as before, but 

vaster ,"142. 
On revisiting the Seashore, 171. 
Opera, the, 69, 80, 81. 
Opinion, hatred of, 63. 
Opinions, 135. 
Optical illusion, an, 39. 
Orange blossom, 114. 
Order in dreams, 113. 
Organ pipes, 56, 57. 
Originality, 135. 
star benign, 64. 
Over-blaming, the danger of, 

168. 
Owls, 39. 

Pain, 2. 

Painting, 8, 135. 
Palm, the, 51. 
Paradise Lost, 62. 
Pars altera mei, 40. 
Parties, political, 188. 
Partisans and renegades, 147. 
Passion for the mot propre, the, 

131. 
Past and present, 1. 
Peace ancl war, 125. 



"268 



INDEX OF SUBJECTS 



Peacock, 151. 

Pedantry, '2<). 

Pen, the, 100. 

Pencils, 1-tS. 

People, the, 147 ; the spirit of 
a, 244. 

Petrarch's Epistles, 221, 

" Phantoms of sublimity,'' 14o. 

Philanthropy, self-advertit lug, 
211. _ * _ 

Philosophy, 66 ; Coleridge's in- 
debtedness to German, .S9 ; 
216 ; Platonic, 21U ; 221. 

Pine-tree, a, lo9. 

Pious aspiration, a, 180. 

Places and persons, 59-62. 

Plagiarism, 22. 

Play, an unsuccessful, 22. 

Pleasure, 2, 27. 

Poem on the Spirit, or on Spi- 
noza, 51. 

Poetic license, a plea for, 140- 

Poetry, 4, 50, 66, 129, loO, 135, 
139, 140, 157, 193. 

Poets, 18. 81, 108, 132, 197, 227, 
228. _ 

Poisoning, 149. 

Populace and people, 147. 

Post, the, 21. 

Practical man, a, 169. 

Praise, the meed of, 241. 

Preexistence, 183. 

Prejudices, 9. 

Presentiments, 217. 

Pronoun, a neutral, 160. 

Property, 37. 

Prophecy, the manufacture of, 
l(i2. 

Protestantism, 259, 260. 

Prudence versus friendship, 
24(5. 

Pseudo-poets, 132. 

Psychology in youth and matu- 
rity, 184. 

Public opinion and the ser- 
vices, 200. 

Puff" and Slander, 231. 

Fidpit, the, 200, 201. 

Punning, 190. 

Puritans, 224. 

Pyramid, the, 82, 83. 

Quakers, 40. 
Quarrels, 91, 219. 
Quotations, 21. 

Races, 244-246. 

Rain, 224. 

Rainbows, moon, 16 ; in the 

mist, 51 ; 87. 
Rattlesnake, 79. 



Recantation, 259. index of 

Recollection and remembrance, subjects 

48. 
Reconciliation, 215. 
Reformers, 177. 
Religion, 53, 66, 117, 184, 224, 

225. 
Religious enthusiasm, 156. 
Bemedium amoris, 225. 
Remorse, 10. 
Rejiose, 22. 

Research, abstruse, 44. 
Rest, 157. 
Reviewers, 188. 
Righteousness of England, the, 

240. 
Rivers, 221. >^> 

Robin, the, 164. \ 

Rosemary, 49. 
Royal road to knowledge, a, 

252. 
Rugit leo, 255. 

Salt, 237, 238. 

Salve for wounded vanity, a, 70. 

Save me from my friends, 224. 

Scandal, 224. 

Scheming, 89. 

Scholastic terms, a plea for, 
232. 

Schools, public, 50. 

Science and philosophy, 221. 

Sea, the, 73, 84, 85, 92, 158. 

Sea-gulls, 85. 

Secrets 23. 

Self, the abstract, 101, 102 ; 170. 

Self-absorption and selfishness, 
210. 

Self-esteem, defect of, 168. 

Self-esteem, excess of, 168. 

Selfishness, 210, 211, 

Self-love, 255. 

Self -reproof, a measure in. 69. 

Sensation, the continuity of, 86. 

Sentiment, an antidote to casu- 
istry, 105 ; morbid, 143. 

Sentiments below morals, 131. 

Seriores rosce, 231 . 

Serious memorandum, a, 66. 

Sermons, ancient and modern, 
200. 

Seventeen hundred and sixty 
yards not exactly a mile, 237. 

Shadow, 150. 

SheUs, 250. 

Ships, 72, 92. 

Silence is golden, 219, 

Simile, a, 64. 

Sine qua non, 1.58. 

Sky, the. 158. 
■ Slang, religious, 50. 



269 



INDEX OF SUBJECTS 



INDEX OF Sleep, 202, 203. _ 
SUBJECTS Sleepless, the feint of the, 212. 
Snail, 7(1. 

Snails of intellect, 5. 
Snuff, 184. 
Socinianism, 20, 21. 
Solvitur suspiciendo, 158. 
Sonnet, an unwritten, 250. 
Soother in Absence, The, 57, 71, 

73, 80, 84, 97, 124, 135, 137, 

148. 
Sopha of sods, the, 50. 
Sorrow, 26. 
Soul, the, 17; the embryonic, 

88; i;>(.i. 
Sounds, 10. 
Space, 10. 

Speculative men, 125. 
Spiders, 2(), 220. 
Spiritual blindness, 228. 
Spiritualism and mysticism, 

233. 
Spiritual religion, 117. 
Spooks, 238. 

Spring, the breath of, 258. 
Spring of water, a, 14. 
Square, the circle, the pyramid, 

the, 82. 
Stag-betitle, the, 79. 
Staircase, a, 133. 
Star, the evening, 64, 209. 
Stork, the, 139. 
Story, a good, 21. 
Stramonium, 223. 
Streamy association, of, 46. 
Style, 230. 

Subject and object, 249. 
Suicide, 1()6. 
Sun-dog, a, 82. 
Sunflower, the, 149. 
Sun of righteousness, the, 137. 
Sunset, 43, 215. _ 
Superfluous entity, a, 183. 
Superstition, 121, 225, 234-236. 
Supposition, a, 117. 
Swinside, 16. 
Swiss patriot, a, 174. 
Sympathy, 19, 2.39. 

Taper, a newly lighted, 64. 
Taste an ethical quality, 139. 
Tatanaman, lil6. 
Teleology and nature worship, 

29. 
Temperament and morals, 27. 
Tender mercies of the good, 

the, 176. 
That inward eye, the bliss of 

solitude, 208. 
Theism and atheism, 242. 
Things and Thoughts, 22, 



Things visible and invisible, of, 

6-12. 
Thinking, and perceiving, 

10 ; as distinguished from 

thought) 13. 
Thistle, 8. 
Thought, and thoughts, 22; 

a mortal agony of, 53 ; and 

things, 121 ; and attention, 

180. 
Thoughts, and fancies, 18 ; 22, 

160. 
Three estates of being, the, 

249. 
Time, 18 ; an element of grief, 

26 ; and eternity, 1.31, 243. 
Time Heal and Imaginary, 204, 

205. 
Time to cry out, a, 186. 
To the Evening Star, 209. 
Transcripts from my velvet- 
paper j)ocket-books, 21. 
Transubstantiation, 51, 260. 
Treacherous knave, a, 23. 
Truth, 6, 139, 161, 185, 195. 
Truth, the, ()7, 68, 192, 193. 
Turtle, 80, 17(). 
Turtle-shell for household tub, 

a, 175. 

Understanding, 1.52. 
Understood, the wish to be, 19. 
Undisciplined will, the, 54. 
Unitarians, 11, 142, 219. 
Unitarian schoolman, a, 48. 
Universe, the, 22. 

Vainglory, 172. 

Vanity, 70. 

Verbal conceits, 91. 

Verbum sapientibus, 86. 

Ver, ztr, and al, 159. 

Vice, 46. 

Vices, gloating over past, 18 ; 

43. 
Virtue, 118. 
Virtues, 69. 
Visibility of motion, the, 65, 

66. 
Visions of the night, in the, 

35. 
Vox hiemalis, 257. 

Wasp, 80. 

Water-lily, 1.36, 243. 

Water- wagtails, 151. 

We ask not whence, but what 

and whither, 75. 
Whale and trout, 4. 
What man has made of man. 



270 



INDEX OF SUBJECTS 



Will, free, <H. 
^Wind, 257. 
Windmill and its shadow, the, 

o5. 
Winter, 257. 
Winter, a mild, 144. 
Wit, 237, 238. 
Wives, 165. 

Woman, a passionate, 151. 
Woman, of the frowardness'jf, 

75. 
Words, 9, 74, 126, 131, 149, 153, 



154, 159, 190, 193-196, 225. index of 
228 232, 233. _, ^ , subjects 

Wordsworth and The Prelude, 
24. 

World, the end of the, 157, 158. 

Worldly-wise, 194. 

Yearning of the finite for the 

infinite, the, 68. 
Youth, 184. 



Zemrai, the, 229, 



271 





L'BRARY OF CONGRESS 




014 459 215 3 



